Apple Silicon M1 Emulating x86 is Still Faster Than Every Other Mac in Single Core Benchmark

[Bandaman]

For now it doesn't. It may in the future, noone knows for sure. But if it doesn't, they will likely have a reason for why (as in performance is enough.) Apple Silicon Mac Pros will have some kind of options here (unless they decide to discontinue it.) Doubting they do personally. Feels like this is every time something hits the market we get his FUD responses and it's just tiring. Anyway, people can complain if they want to, it's still free to do so.

It's a very big issue, not something to scoff at. It was a very important capability of the Mac. Hopefully it gets support in the future.

 

[tonny3k]

@cmaier

Can you please share some info on how ARM approaches backwards compatibility?
I always assumed they have more freedom in taking out old garbage and changing design since they are normally used in tightly integrated systems.
Like for example when Apple removed compatibility for 32bit iOS apps, they could then take out any supporting bits from future chips as well and simplify the design.

Thanks!

 

[mannyvel]

For now it doesn't. It may in the future, noone knows for sure. But if it doesn't, they will likely have a reason for why (as in performance is enough.) Apple Silicon Mac Pros will have some kind of options here (unless they decide to discontinue it.) Doubting they do personally. Feels like this is every time something hits the market we get his FUD responses and it's just tiring. Anyway, people can complain if they want to, it's still free to do so.

eGPUs are basically plugged right into a PCI bus. It doesn't look like the M1 series stuff has a full/real PCI bus, which makes eGPUs pretty much impossible to implement right now. This is probably going to be an M2/pro feature, like > 16GB.

 

[acidfast7_redux]

I tend to buy the best I can afford not because I need the latest with the most but because 5 years (or more) later its still runs pretty well. You buy only what you need and a couple of update cycles and you've got a slow machine. No matter whose OS and chipsets are in it.

The machine this is replacing an early 2013 rMBP that just starting running Catalina well. It was hardly slow and did everything I needed.

I could have easily bought a top-spec machine but why throw money away.

I bet that we do similar things (this is where you laundry list all of the processor-intensive things you do ... run garage band and play a guitar at parties for the ladies or worse yet ... "DJ" at parties and video edit for you mum ... to look like a heavy user to justify your purchase.)

 

[architect1337]

Damn, still need boot camp for some of my games but getting really tempted...

Should be an interesting shootout - Dell XPS 13 11th Gen Intel CPU with Xe graphics vs Macbook Pro M1. Who can be the more productive? Should be fairly similar prices so a fair comparison?

 

[acidfast7_redux]

Indeed people tend to obsess about the number when they should just estimate their needs better.

The number of times I've already seen not under it has 64 GiB of RAM in this thread is crazy!

 

[focher]

no honestly the only complaint here is in how closed this system is going to become and for seemingly no good reason.
but M1 looks like a legit beast.

Why do people keep spreading that message? Linux has ARM support and the M1 can easily be supported. Microsoft could choose to support Windows on it. The T2 allows disabling its boot volume signature checks. It’s no more “closed” than the PPC version of Macs were.

 

[Serban55]

Should be an interesting shootout - Dell XPS 13 11th Gen Intel CPU with Xe graphics vs Macbook Pro M1. Who can be the more productive? Should be fairly similar prices so a fair comparison?

on first look the M1 is still the best...Xe graphics is an ok improvement but vs 10th gen Intel igpu

 

[thedocbwarren]

It's a very big issue, not something to scoff at. It was a very important capability of the Mac. Hopefully it gets support in the future.

As someone else mentioned it's a replacement of lower-end systems right now. I imagine we get a redesign next year. For the record I use an eGPU on my MacBook Pro 16 for rendering and such (not really that important to mention.) I do think it's worth waiting to see where that goes. I originally was waiting to buy a big navi card for mine to replace the placeholder extra rx580 I had. the rx580 runs -slightly- better than the 5500m. The eGPU keeps the MBP from throttling due to heat if I use the CPU and GPU strongly.

I do understand people were enhancing the Mac Mini by doing this (considered myself.) I[d suggest wait till we get upgraded chips next year or we hear something from Apple on this.

 

[Bandaman]

As someone else mentioned it's a replacement of lower-end systems right now. I imagine we get a redesign next year. For the record I use an eGPU on my MacBook Pro 16 for rendering and such (not really that important to mention.) I do think it's worth waiting to see where that goes. I originally was waiting to buy a big navi card for mine to replace the placeholder extra rx580 I had. the rx580 runs -slightly- better than the 5500m. The eGPU keeps the MBP from throttling due to heat if I use the CPU and GPU strongly.

I do understand people were enhancing the Mac Mini by doing this (considered myself.) I[d suggest wait till we get upgraded chips next year or we hear something from Apple on this.

I'm probably just going to keep an M1 Apple laptop around for the ridiculous battery life and switch my production back to a custom-built Windows machine. I liked doing big workloads with the eGPU, but if it ends up not supporting this, then I will probably go back to Windows ... unless the 15" coming out later has something crazy built into it. I guess I'll just have to wait and see.

 

[macdos]

M1 is actually only marginally faster PER CORE than MM 2018. And limited to 16 GB. What's the hoopla about again?

 

[focher]

M1 is actually only marginally faster PER CORE than MM 2018. And limited to 16 GB. What's the hoopla about again?

Nothing. You can move along.

 

[coredev]

To be honest here, what Rosetta does is not emulation but cross compilation. The Intel code is translated to ARM instructions once before the app starts. Once it runs, it's native ARM code.
Since the compiler cannot take good hints from the original source code, it is slower than a "real" native app, but still a lot faster than emulating the instruction set.

 

[Brien]

Out of every detail presented in the last week, the 5nm process, when announced, was the most impressive and likely the most important.

Still blown away by that being employed on such a large scale.

Next up, 3nm in 18 to 24 months.

TSMC will hit 2nm before Intel gets below 10, IMO

 

[Seoras]

But what are all the Apple-haters and Me-doubters going to complain about if that’s the case?

Oh, I know. They’ll fall back to “but it doesn’t virtualize x86.”

Anyway, that’s actually more of a Rosetta-speed hit than I expected, but we’ll see when we get real world data.

Complain that you can’t flip it over and fry an egg on its ass

 

[im_to_hyper]

But what are all the Apple-haters and Me-doubters going to complain about if that’s the case?

Oh, I know. They’ll fall back to “but it doesn’t virtualize x86.”

Anyway, that’s actually more of a Rosetta-speed hit than I expected, but we’ll see when we get real world data.

Parallels is already working on a native software solution

 

[flottenheimer]

Wow!
Planned on waiting for the reviews, but man, I'm ordering an Air now.

 

[Icelus]

The problem is, will rosetta work with vmware fusion 12 that emulates windows xp? I need one small program to run that only runs on windows xp.

There is probably a Mac version of Minesweeper.

 

[thedocbwarren]

The problem is, will rosetta work with vmware fusion 12 that emulates windows xp? I need one small program to run that only runs on windows xp.

uh no. You might want to look at something in the cloud or maybe qemu-based for this. Likely not very great and probably nothing supported yet for AS. There is a point where you may need to move on.

 

[uller6]

No, it will not.

You'll have the option maybe to spin up windows XP in BOCHS (or similar), but that's not virtualisation in the same way VMware is. Its quite a bit slower. But really. If you're depending on XP applications - you've had like... 10 years of no OS support telling you its time to get off.

It really is TIME TO GET OFF it.

I depend on windows xp applications to do my job. It’s obviously not my choice, but I would much rather run a virtualized XP than keep a physical XP machine around. Sometimes you have a million dollar machine that can’t easily be replaced that happens to run windows XP and spit out data in a proprietary format. Life’s complicated.

I also use AutoCAD frequently. I’m in the small minority of users who have very specialized software needs that determine my flexibility. I’ve loved the long run of intel macs, but even before that I was running windows on PPC using virtualPC (very, very slowly). I hope something like virtualPC comes along and let’s me keep running my windows XP code.

 

[HandITOVER]

SMH.

 

[thedocbwarren]

I depend on windows xp applications to do my job. It’s obviously not my choice, but I would much rather run a virtualized XP than keep a physical XP machine around. Sometimes you have a million dollar machine that can’t easily be replaced that happens to run windows XP and spit out data in a proprietary format. Life’s complicated.

I also use AutoCAD frequently. I’m in the small minority of users who have very specialized software needs that determine my flexibility. I’ve loved the long run of intel macs, but even before that I was running windows on PPC using virtualPC (very, very slowly). I hope something like virtualPC comes along and let’s me keep running my windows XP code.

All jokes aside, I think you may not be a candate for Apple Silicon Macs right now. You'll need some kind of emulator to fully emulate an older envireonment. I'm assuming you might be on a 32-bit supporting OS as well (although x64 was available with XP.) That being the case it may never get support. Have you tried these older software title in Win 10? Might be worth cloud VMing these.

 

[thedocbwarren]

Here is what Apple didn't discuss in the November event and what happen if Intel is ready to launch CPU build with 7nm.



View attachment 1668982

Based on?

 

[Lammers]

It's a very big issue, not something to scoff at. It was a very important capability of the Mac. Hopefully it gets support in the future.

That’s highly debatable. It might be a very important capability to you and a handful of others, but in terms of the overall Mac landscape it’s surely only relevant to a tiny fraction of Mac users. In the grand scheme of things, and especially in light of Apple’s own GPU investments, it’s not hard to imagine that Apple may decide that it’s not worth the effort to continue eGPU support.

 

[dazzer21-2]

So... from what I've gleaned so far, a bitter complaint has appeared to be that Bootcamp is dead. But this new benchmark would appear to contradict that. So is this a legit announcement that once these machines are in the real world, they WILL be able to run Windows under emulation, at speeds that are quicker than has previously been achieved thus far? Overnight?!