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

[arn]

How did they get these scores on machines not shipped yet? The article says nothing, just accepts it all as fact.

Review units.

 

[swingerofbirch]

How long does Geekbench test for? Curious if it sustains those speeds. There must be a reason for the fan in the 13" MBP if the speeds are otherwise the same?

 

[srgz]

IF this architecture can scale well, and developers get on board with it, it's going to be great in a year or so. But right now, 99% of the plug-ins that I own for my content creation and audio production apps either won't work at all, or won't run natively.

 

[Chompineer]

Holy.... GAME CHANGER....

Intel and AMD, rest in peace.

Apple comprises a very small market share for them, this means nothing to just about the entire computing market, considering apple won’t be selling chips to anyone else.

The chip is nice, but ultimately no one outside of the apple ecosystem is going to care because it’s not viable for them.

 

[Samuel Sosa]

So, what's the likely catch? I'm willing to believe this processor is exceptionally powerful per watt, and give Apple credit where credit is clearly due, but there must be a tradeoff somewhere. Intel, AMD, even IBM or Qualcomm, know a lot about CPU design and have been fighting over the best engineers for decades.

It strikes me as unlikely that Apple has simply beaten all of them in all use cases, with less power, on their first desktop class CPU. It's not that I'm calling BS, just that engineering doesn't usually work that way; there's usually a tradeoff made somewhere.

Apple has been making there own chips for a while on iPhones and iPads. I think that when they started the iPad Pro line they started getting serious about it. I guess they built on top of that. I’m happy that apple no longer has to depend on intel for upgrades. They are only give if us a taste. Got to wait and see where this goes. Should be interesting

 

[rafark]

Do you think this means new Macs every year like it happens with the iPhone? Mac with M1 this year, next year the same Mac with m2, then with an m3 etc?

 

[Diode]

Shame it only supports one external display.

 

[Tech198]

IF this architecture can scale well, and developers get on board with it, it's going to be great in a year or so. But right now, 99% of the plug-ins that I own for my content creation and audio production apps either won't work at all, or won't run natively.

That could also have the downward as well..

It'll take "a year" for maturity. The question is: Are people willing to wait that long after purchasing one. With any luck, it may be sooner .

It's easy to go from from to the ther when a model is alreay there, but not when ts brand new. Allot of apps could also just be universal one, instead of native, just to fill the gap.

 

[Toratek]

Debbie Downers where you at???

Too busy desperately working on an argument to fit their pathetic narrative... In one stroke, Apple has put Moore’s law back on the rails.

 

[firewood]

I think their port of tensorflow is only for application of ML, not for training ML. There are some threads on reddit about it. That is my annoyance about Mac: no way to train ML. I’m thinking of buying a desktop PC.

Not quite no way. I've been training on my MacBookPro16.2, running Keras inside a Linux Docker image. But no GPU acceleration, so it's slow, and the fans get noisy. And no Mac support for something like a 2070 or 2080 Super.

 

[unchecked]

If the benchmarks are so amazing and blows Intel out of the water, why didn't Apple do direct benchmarks against specific intel chips in its keynote as it has done traditionally?

Why put meaningless "2x", "3x", "4x" stuff that can easily be disregarded as empty marketing?

Bring back Steve Job's Photoshop benchmarks or some real world meaningful test back to keynotes.

Because it's a new chip and infrastructure and a lot of apps aren't properly ported over yet?

 

[jlocker]

I normally don't part take in 1st gen Apple products (or other company's) but this time I'm antsy. I don't know if I will be able to stand on the sideline. I want one of these babies with the M1 chip. I skipped 1st gen iPhone, AirPods, Apple Watch.

This is not a iPad or a iPhone, all most all Mac code right now, runs under x86 code, which means that the application has to run threw Rosetta II to make it work which will make it slower, until the application can be coded to run on the new processor.

 

[JohnnyGo]

Some more trivia. They were original called EVSX, which stood for “everything else sucks.” And they formed in our Austin office as Exponential Technology was going out of business.

Great story. Hard work does pay off

 

[citysnaps]

Looking forward to running MATLAB on my M1 MBA. Should be interesting. It sounds so wrong.

 

[cmaier]

If the benchmarks are so amazing and blows Intel out of the water, why didn't Apple do direct benchmarks against specific intel chips in its keynote as it has done traditionally?

Why put meaningless "2x", "3x", "4x" stuff that can easily be disregarded as empty marketing?

Bring back Steve Job's Photoshop benchmarks or some real world meaningful test back to keynotes.

Apple seldom does benchmarks, and why should they? Undersell it and let the whole internet go nuts when they find out how much they sandbagged expectations.

 

[grjj]

Apple seldom does benchmarks, and why should they? Undersell it and let the whole internet go nuts when they find out how much they sandbagged expectations.

Under promise, over deliver.

 

[joloriquelme]

With this level of performance, we could see developers and Software companies turning their priorities to the Mac.

What about if devs like Adobe and Autodesk decided to push full-apps to macOS with ARM and only limited versions of AutoCAD or Photoshop for Windows in the next 5 to 10 years?

Can Intel x86 get this performance in the long term?

 

[JohnnyGo]

I normally don't part take in 1st gen Apple products (or other company's) but this time I'm antsy. I don't know if I will be able to stand on the sideline. I want one of these babies with the M1 chip. I skipped 1st gen iPhone, AirPods, Apple Watch.

Same here. Going for the base Mac mini. Cheapest entry point. Waiting for more mature products in 2 years

 

[trifid]

Because it's a new chip and infrastructure and a lot of apps aren't properly ported over yet?

Apple's Final Cut could have been a great demo, and it's a 1st party app which Apple controls and can have ready. I just think it was a huge missed opportunity to show the world it's a true leap forward.

 

[TheFluffyDuck]

Debbie Downers where you at???

Hi, I am one. What are the graphics scores? It's an integrated graphics GPU. How does it stack up to a mobile version of Nvidia 3000 series? My guess is not well.

 

[harmoniumfarfisa]

This is what I was expecting.

(Also check out that 2017 iMac workhorse, that's impressive)

 

[Kung gu]

Apple comprises a very small market share for them, this means nothing to just about the entire computing market, considering apple won’t be selling chips to anyone else.

The chip is nice, but ultimately no one outside of the apple ecosystem is going to care because it’s not viable for them.

maybe creatives will now and progrsamers and the vast ios ecosystem will entice users

 

[GhostRaider]

That's pretty impressive, especially for a first generation Apple M1 chip. 😮😮 Apple isn't playing any games anymore with Intel!

 

[NT1440]

IF this architecture can scale well, and developers get on board with it, it's going to be great in a year or so. But right now, 99% of the plug-ins that I own for my content creation and audio production apps either won't work at all, or won't run natively.

I mean, they only explicitly bragged about the scalability of their architecture like every other minute at WWDC....

The world is going to be shocked by what is coming to the “performance” oriented macs.

 

[JohnnyGo]

How long does Geekbench test for? Curious if it sustains those speeds. There must be a reason for the fan in the 13" MBP if the speeds are otherwise the same?

Sustained workloads over longer periods of time. Benchmarks are short bursts of activity