The RAM is on the SoC package, but not part of the silicon die that contains the CPU, GPU, Neural Engine, etc
Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
Apple Silicon M1 Chip in MacBook Air Outperforms High-End 16-Inch MacBook Pro
- Thread starter MacRumors
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
Intel is clearly not what they used to be up until the early 2000s, I spent 17 years there, but, they have been working on the "chiplet approach" for years (Foveros, but you probably know that) and it appears that it is what the M1 is using and greatly helps with performance (can't wait to get the teardown/xrays ... ). But I don't have much hope for intel anymore as their desktop/laptop market is not going to grow and they are getting serious competition in the datacenter (Ampere, Nuvia etc), but that's getting off topic ...
The 5600x is a $300 desktop processor with a 65W power draw. We're talking about a 10W chip on a $1000 fanless laptop.
The 5600x is a desktop chip though, and definitely needs decent cooling to hit those numbers. The really impressive thing with the M1 is that it's doing that with passive cooling. Obviously, we don't know if the machine is going to borderline catch fire - their last Air definitely got close under mild load, but it's still early days.
Sorry, I was initially confused by your comment:
"That's damn impressive. I think I'll still be holding off until they update the design but for a fanless machine, these numbers are insane. "
So your waiting for a redesigned fanless machine.
Just stick 8 (or more) of these SOCs (basic design, obviously make the minor tweaks required to link them together) on a big package and link them together AMD chiplet style. Get 64 cores and 64 GPU cores in the package.
Add a fan. Run in 60-90 watts instead of... 5-10 watts like the MBA variant does.
Stick it in a 27" iMac (or hell, at 60 watts - inside a 16" MacBook Pro).
job done
I'm actually waiting for a redesigned 13" Pro, but I can see how my wording could have been confusing.
What I'm trying to say is:
1. I'm going to wait for an external overhaul/redesign before buying (although I actually want a Pro, not an Air).
2. The Air is getting impressive numbers considering the lack of active cooling.
No fear, I watch Rene Ritchie, Snazzy Labs, MKBHD, and a slew of other tech content. They have never needed huge data sets to give recommendations one way or the other. Hell, most of them will smother you with opinion after just a quick hands-on. Most of them will happily wait for GeekBench results and teardowns like the rest of us to do the deep dives that, again, the "normal consumer" does not care about.
Yeah, you should probably wait and see what happens. You can't install Windows on the M1 Macs at the moment. Your current MBP is awesome; enjoy it until the x86 emulation gets figured out (if at all).
I am curious how you think the Unified Memory Architecture will affect GPU performance. It seems that not having to move data to and from the GPU should have a fairly positive impact on overall performance. Also, what do you expect the upper limit will be for SoC on chip RAM will be? I would love 32GB or 64GB for my next mini (not buying until it has 10Gb/s Ethernet again, but I can wait).
I am unqualified to know re: UMA. There are pluses and minuses. Nice not to have to transfer, but I don’t know how often that happens. And now you have resource contention issues that you might not otherwise have had. Unfortunately I know very little about GPU memory access patterns - I was always a CPU guy, and none of our chips had any sort of GPU functionality.
As for RAM, I think the upper limit will be determined by economics and not anything technical. Even if 128GB resulted in a long set of address/data wires to the farthest memory row, it would still be a hell of a lot closer than an external DIMM. So it just comes down to how many channels they want to put on the chip periphery, and whether the L2 is big enough so that performance doesn’t crash when there’s too much RAM (ideal cache size to memory size ratio is loosely coupled. Since memory accesses are localized, generally you don’t need to double cache just because you doubled RAM. But if you have 128GB and are actually using it because you are running 3 or 4 big processes simultaneously, you would need more than the 64k L2 cache. But then if you double the L2 cache, you probably want to double the L1 cache, which might have other implications. )
Which is a lot of hand waving. But the real answer is I think we’ll see 64GB supported for MBP 13”/16” with 4 TB3 ports, and iMacs, by june or july, using an M1x, which will have more I/O support and probably more cores. It will probably also support a separate apple-designed GPU chip (call it ”discrete” or not. Semantics.) which will be an option on those machines, and which is probably what the real hang-up is.
How long do you think the Air will be able to keep up with sustained high CPU performance with no active cooling vs a desktop that has active cooling? Not very long. The AMD 5600x will deliver far better performance, especially if paired with a decent GPU.
These are not real-life benchmarks. An AMD 5600x desktop machine will handily outperform a Macbook Air, especially under sustained CPU / GPU stress.
Yeah, i don’t know anything. I just designed parts of AMD K6-II, K6-III, Athlon 64, Opteron, Sun Ultrasparc V, Exponential x704, etc.
Yeah but the Ryzen is using how many watts? 65? The MBA processor is doing it in 10 watts or less with no fan.
And yes sure sustained performance won't necessarily be great with no fan. But that's what the MacBook Pro is for. With a fan.
A redesigned Macbook 13" Pro hopefully won't have the limitations of only 16Gb RAM max, 1 external monitor, 2 USB4 / TB3 ports. It will be well worth the wait, with the increased CPU performance it will bring. This will be a replacement for the higher end models.
Indeed, the raw benchmarks are impressive of the Air. I'm looking forward to seeing real life benchmarks comparisons against existing Intel Macbooks.
Also on par with Radeon Pro 560X: https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/compute/1802234
Last edited:
I mean, if you can shove that $300 65w processor into a $1000 fanless laptop, sure that's great. Context matters, just like your signature.
The fact you and others had to quote the performance of a latest desktop processor with a much higher price tag and a power budget to downplay the performance of the M1 says a lot.
Are the 5600x laptop processors though?
The Mac mini also has a model number that seems off. It shows as Macmini9,1, but Geekbench shows Intel Core I5 versions under that same model number: https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/search?q=Macmini9,1
Yeah, I'm also hoping for some of the features from the iPad Pro to make their way over too - higher refresh rate display and FaceID in particular.
And yes, I'm curious what the Air will be like under sustained load for a while and whether/how soon it might start to thermal throttle.
Well it won’t do virtualization for now, and it’s limited in I/O (16 GB RAM, 2 PCIe lanes). Also no word on dedicated GPU compatibility...
A month ago I bought a 16" MBP 2.4GHz, 64GB, 4TB, 5600M. I don't regret it at all. It will be my primary machine for 3 years or so and then I'll move to a 2nd or 3rd generation 16" Apple Silicon machine. I can't see 16GB RAM really working for me, and my 16" is driving 3 displays. I still need to occasionally run Windows for our software development business. I can't wait.
You can't at the moment. Who knows if the elves will work some magic, but it's a ways out.