Apple Silicon M1 Chip in MacBook Air Outperforms High-End 16-Inch MacBook Pro

[gnasher729]

Geek bench is Apple Silicon Native ?

AMD and Intel pray it is. Because if it isn't then they are in even worse trouble.

 

[azentropy]

Shipping times are already slipping 2-3 weeks.

 

[ArPe]

You’ll never have to ask if it is snappy again 😂

Just don’t try loading dozens of Red raw video clips and a multi gigabyte 3D scene yet. That will come later.

The new Call of Duty game is 136GB install and 40 gigabytes was the high res assets alone. “Desktop” CPUs and dedicated 250-300 watt ray tracing graphics cards are your only choice for that level of gaming right now so people on this discussion saying x86/AMD/Nvidia are dead aren’t being realistic.

 

[Machspeed007]

Buy can I run chrome on it

Emulated, not native.

 

[bklement]

The problem is that even if Apple's ARM processors continue to perform in real world applications, similarly to other desktop processors from AMD/Intel, Apple is still pricing the Mac's far higher, even though the cost of the device to them becomes lower because they don't have to pay Intel for the processor.

So a consumer will still be faced with paying an Apple Tax just to be in the Apple ecosphere. That being said, it means that Apple don't have to worry about being criticised for using 2-3 year parts and still charging a premium for an Intel based laptop.

Not anymore, at least what I consider alternatives are similarly or even higher priced, if I relax my expectations to the bare minimum, the I can find maybe a 150 bucks cheaper model. And those are not made-up alternatives from me, I am coming from those, personally never owned a MacBook, only had them as company machines.

 

[woocintosh]

M1's clock speed is far higher than I thought. It's a surprise without fan cooling...

 

[gnasher729]

RISC processors like the M1 are very good at sequential calculations. Let's see how it performs when tasked with branching code / real applications.

I think you don't know what you are talking about. I just know that A14 can perform two conditional branches per cycle, while Intel takes at least two branches per cycle. Plus Intel's branch prediction ignores the last 3 bits of the address of a branch, so two branches close together have their branch prediction mixed up.

 

[gnasher729]

So given none of these benchmarks are not even twice as fast as any Intel Mac, which PC were they referencing that meant the Air was “more than three times faster” than the best selling PC in its class?

You didn't look far enough down in the charts to look at the dual core Macs. The New MacBook Air is more than 3.5 times faster than the old dual core MacBook Air. I'm sure the best selling PCs are dual core.

 

[coredev]

sorry to be off topic here, but anyone found any info on whether Chrome will natively support the M1 MBA?
it happens to be that I am helping a friend getting a new MBA for school, but she won't touch Safari.

I am sure Google is on this, but anyone has any info on this?

It will be natively supported for sure. It's not out yet though, but then no consumer has a M1 powered MBA either.

 

[johnnyzg]

This Single-Core result outperforms Multi-Core result of my rMBP 13 late 2013

I will probably upgrade after 7 years now to MacBook Air, but am still waiting for availability and prices in my country. It will probably be expensive as last gen Macbook Air with 512GB SSD was 1625 EUR, compared to 1399 EUR in rest or EU. I just hate Apcom distributor for charging us 15-20% more (225 EUR in this case) just because they can.

 

[RobbieTT]

It’s not clear what you mean by going through Rosetta - Rosetta is a translator, not an emulator. It does a one time translation (with some exceptions due to peculiarities of how code pages work in x86) when an app is installed or first run, but after that it is running native code. If you’re going to think about the performance impact, think of the penalty of Rosetta as being more akin to using a bad compiler (or a compiler with the optimization flags turned off) rather than the penalty that occurs when you use an emulator.

Unlike your good self I have no direct knowledge of modern chip design so please forgive me if I use incorrect terms but I do have a good friend who keeps a very keen eye on various ARM silicon designs from his lab in Cambridge.

One thing he noted on the M1 die was dedicated hardware acceleration for some of the Rosetta 2 functions, to offload the CPU cores. He did use the 'emulation' term when talking about this part of Rosetta, which calls upon routines used post install / translation. He did muse that with dedicated hardware offload available to Rosetta the performance impact may be considerably lower than we would otherwise expect. The advantage of designing your own SoCs I guess.

 

[Lyrca]

I upgraded in 2019 my MBP so won't be upgrading for a while but I am really excited about what is ahead of us given how significant the improvements already are.

Looking forward to these machines being delivered and tested.

 

[Eweie]

is no one questioning why the MacBook Air with no active cooling is outperforming the Mac mini and MacBook 13" with active cooling? why would the Mac mini run at a slightly lower clock speed?

 

[tekdoc]

Imagine how powerful the M chips will be three years from now.

Does Moore's Law not apply to Apple?

 

[bluecoast]

And this is from Apple's 'weakest' entry level computer... Wow. I can't wait for the full testing benchmarks.

 

[DNichter]

Holy moly. Pretty much a wrap for the rest of the computer industry. Intel blew their lead. I’m very tempted to jump back into macOS.

 

[heywally]

Just an incredible leap. Can't wait for this to shine in a 2022 iMac.

Pending

 

[ani4ani]

You didn't look far enough down in the charts to look at the dual core Macs. The New MacBook Air is more than 3.5 times faster than the old dual core MacBook Air. I'm sure the best selling PCs are dual core.

Yes, but the best selling PC in the Air's class, [the actual claim and quote] i.e. the cost of a MacBook Air is not going to be dual core is it?

 

[coredev]

Sitting here on a newly purchased 2019 MBP 16" and wondering if I should return it and get the MBP 13" now

If you only got the 16" for the performance, you might.
I wanted to get the 16" beginning of the year, but held out so far, and now am waiting for the M based revision.
13" isn't going to do it for me, because I need a bigger screen.

 

[ValO]

Not anymore, at least what I consider alternatives are similarly or even higher priced, if I relax my expectations to the bare minimum, the I can find maybe a 150 bucks cheaper model. And those are not made-up alternatives from me, I am coming from those, personally never owned a MacBook, only had them as company machines.

with Apple silicon apple will have the ability to launch a cheaper MacBook . They could revive the 11 inch MacBook Air or the 12 inch MacBook at around $899 . For kids, students, etc.
my guess for the higher end Macs with apple silicon is that they won’t get cheaper, but will get more custom features for the same price that would have been very difficult to implement with intel silicon (face id, ar, MagSafe,truemotion) For the portables/laptops it will be very interesting to see what will happen with the iPad Pro , though . Everyone is focusing on the Macs , but will apple be able to put the same apple silicon as the MacBook Air into the iPad pro’s in the near future? Will apple allow iPad pro’s to switch to macOS when a keyboard and trackpad is attached and default back to iPadOS with touch when there is no keyboard/trackpad? The iPad Pro’s could be the higher end devices compared to a MacBook air.(pencil support /touchscreen with touch optimized IOS, when needed), 120 hz, etc.
It is already more expensive than the MacBook Air when you configure a 12,9 inch iPad Pro with 256gb, and a magic keyboard.
So, where will the iPad Pro go? it had the advantage of a great ipadOs library of apps, but now most of the apps will run on the Mac, it looses that advantage.

IMO, this apple silicon is interesting for the Mac, but it raises a lot of questions for the iPad Pro line up. it could be the first step in merging the iPad Pro and Macbook(not pro) platforms, into a new one.

an iPad Pro 12.9 inch ,256gb , with a magic keyboard (folio) is about $1449, the air starts at $999, the macbook Pro at $1299. all iPad apps will run on the MacBooks. I could get a MacBook Air and a very decent iPad for that amount of money to have best of both worlds. So , something has to happen with the iPad Pro line-up (cheaper?)or the macbook line-up.(120hz?, faceid)

 

[TimWillz]

Thats amazing. This is the progress customers want!

 

[Abaganov]

So how much the early 2020 MBA i3 worth now ? Like $50?

 

[JohnnyGo]

Imagine M2

Indeed!

But imagine a higher TDP allowance, coupled or not with more cores ? Just bring in an M1X with 12 CPU cores (8 hi perf) and 16 GPU cores !

 

[woocintosh]

Intel has only made garbages for about 5 years...

 

[joeguide4]

Moore's Law has awoken from it deep slumber, and it is angry and hungry. Run Intel, run for your life.