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M1 iMac is Up to 56% Faster Than Prior-Generation High-End 21.5-Inch iMac
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All those complaints -- on these very forums -- about the old iMac having terrible cooling, hitting 90C, and then having to heavily throttle to come to mind...
I've been on these forums to understand Apple can never win here. Release the new iMac with white bezels, que "I want black"; release with black bezels and "boring, I want brighter colours", or perhaps with colours: "that's childish, I want black"
This thread is very much the same. Apple release a new iMac that is much faster: "I want some feature that was never coming", "It's not as powerful as my water-cooled $6000 gaming PC", "Why isn't it $99!? I would buy it if it were under $100"
Tell me where the M1 is actually bad for performance if it runs circles around the machine it just replaced.
Bit of a poser for me. Will have to await developments for a larger version but 27 is about max I can go for desk space (held off getting one when M1 rumours started). Suppose I can eke out this 21.5 for a tad longer till it clears up but at least if I do go for this it is capable for me.
They have.
In single-threaded performance, the M1 beats any current desktop CPU.
In multiple threads, yeah, you can get eight or more cores and will beat the M1 in some specialized tasks, but most systems (including most desktop systems) don't have that many cores and don't have those specialized tasks. Multithreading is nice, but sustained parallelization is rare.
IMHO, the 2012-2020 iMac design (unibody, but slimmer) was kind of a misstep. The Intel CPUs especially in the latter years clearly weren't a good fit for what Apple was trying to do. They sort of salvaged that for the iMac Pro, but didn't bother to port that cooling system back to the regular iMac (which likely would've required giving up on the HDD).
The 2021 design is just more honest — its CPU is a better fit in terms of thermals, and plenty good enough for a while.
Did any customer want lower wattage? Maybe not. Did plenty want less noise and heat? Yeah, probably.
That's not an apples to apples comparison either.
Here's a better comparison (Geekbench 5)
Intel i3-10100
1101 - Single Core
4048 - Multi Core
75W - TDP
Intel i3-1120G4
1191 - Single Core
2497 - Multi Core
15W - TDP
M1
1729 - Single Core
7459 - Multi Core
20W - 25W - TDP (Not sure on this, I'm sure someone will correct me)
The M1 is entry level. It needs to be compared to other entry level things. But because the M1 smokes all of those people try to see which non entry level things it compates to.
Even still there's a lot on the M1 that is done outside the fire/ice storm cores which doesn't factor into the geekbench score.
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Apple doesn't really publish a TDP, but it does seem to be somewhere around 15-25W for the M1.
That's kind of what I was trying to point out. The article is comparing an i7 8700 to an M1, the 8700 is a high TDP. If you're going to compare a high TDP to an M1 like this article is, don't use a chip that's from 2017 so you claim "massive performance boosts".
It isn't even really Intel's fault. Their architecture was always destined to be replaced eventually. Yes, it is their fault that they slowed down, but they were going to eventually reach the limits of their rather poorly designed architecture, and ARM and other true RISC architectures (x86 is basically RISC, but with legacy CISC baggage) were going to eventually defeat it.
Apple has done things with their ARM-based architecture that Intel simply cannot do with their current architecture, and that's really all there is to it.
Well, Intel still sells a chip family they call Pentium for entry level. They even sell some Celery class junk.
But I think the M1 should be compared against the i5, the non-hyperthread versions probably. And the M1 is well ahead.
The other reason is that users simply don’t (and shouldn’t) care about whether the Apple CPU is low power or not (assuming thermal design was done and battery life isn’t involved). They simply want the speed.
No. People don’t want to have machines that are extreme loud. My 27” iMac started suddenly its fans without apparent reason. Ten minutes later it stopped. This is something that never happens on the M1..
And bad for anyone willing to use the same amount of electricity as a light bulb to get more speed from a CPU.
You can use the command line “powermetrics” to see the instantaneous TDP when running. It seems to be about 18 W on the M1 MBA.
You could tell it’s a Mac by looking at the actual screen, since it would be displaying the Mac interface, that looks nothing like Windows.
A $45 liquid cooling setup removes the need for fans at all. Fan noise isn’t a reason to prefer low-power CPUs in a desktop machine that will be plugged in 100% of the time and has no portable/battery operation at all.
Yeah, and people will start installing these things into their Macs. This can be done in a custom PC you build yourself. Not on a Mac. Power consumption is important to desktops also. Just not as important as on laptops.
Interesting, but I think that doesn't quite qualify as "TDP".
(On my 45 W TDP CPU, if I do exhaust it for a while, it goes to about 37 W. So I guess it works as an approximation.)
Not my point. My point was that Apple could easily have done this and not been concerned with fan noise, regardless of the wattage the CPU pulled or the performance target.
Well TDP isn’t something that Apple uses either so I was just using the same terminology. If you max out the CPU & GPU cores and look at package power you can watch the max watts. I hit about 18 W and then the MBA starts throttling. So it’s probably a pretty good approximation.
Apple's M1 iMacs are set to start delivering to customers next week, and ahead of the official launch day, benchmarks for the machines have been showing up on Geekbench, likely from reviewers who are testing them.
It will come as no surprise that M1 iMac benchmarks are right on par with benchmarks for the M1 MacBook Pro, MacBook Air, and Mac mini, coming in with an average single-core score of 1724 and an average multi-core score of 7453, aggregated from three benchmarks that are currently available.
Benchmarks are for the iMac21,1, which is likely the entry-level option with an 8-core CPU, a 7-core GPU, and two Thunderbolt ports. The M1 iMac benchmarks list 8 CPU cores and a base frequency of 3.2GHz, and they're running macOS 11.3.
M1 iMac
The 24-inch M1 iMac significantly outperforms the 2019 21.5-inch iMac with an Intel chip that it's replacing, and it's going to be a solid upgrade over all older 21.5-inch machines.
The previous-generation high-end 21.5-inch iMac earned a single-core score of 1109 and a multi-core score of 6014, so the M1 iMac is 56 percent faster when it comes to single-core performance and 24 percent faster when it comes to multi-core performance.
2019 high-end 21.5-inch Intel iMac
Compared to the current high-end 27-inch iMac, the M1 Mac outperforms in single-core performance, but it is lagging behind the 10th-generation Comet Lake Intel chip in multi-core performance. The high-end 27-inch iMac earned a single-core score of 1247 and a multi-core score of 9002.
The M1 iMac's single-core performance is 38 percent faster, but the Intel iMac's multi-core performance is 25 percent faster.
With these scores, the M1 iMac is not going to be able to replace the high-end 27-inch iMac because it lags behind in multi-core performance, but Apple is working on higher-end Apple silicon chips for desktop machines and we'll likely see an even more powerful Apple-designed chip introduced when Apple is ready to replace the 27-inch iMac with a new model.
The M1 iMac does outperform lower-end 27-inch iMac models with Intel chips, beating the 6-core Intel models in both single and multi-core performance.
Pricing on the M1 iMacs starts at $1,299 for the entry-level model and $1,499 for the version with an 8-core GPU, two additional USB-C ports, Gigabit Ethernet, and additional color options. M1 iMac models ordered today will ship out in June, but those who preordered will soon be receiving their machines, and we'll learn more about them when reviews go live.
Article Link: M1 iMac is Up to 56% Faster Than Prior-Generation High-End 21.5-Inch iMac
Although I applied Apple for moving to a more integrated chipset. They have learned a lot from developing phones and how to integrate things more effectively. They learn how to control heat and flow which gives you better performance it is a performance killer. Some of the things they did on the iMac or different than most other pieces where they removed our supply from the iMac altogether to reduce heat in the need for cooling. Repurposing older technology is from Alder Macintosh machines from the past. These test that they run are great because it's just raw data but it's not real world in anyway shape or form and running specific tests on specific applications again is no way to truly benchmark CPU performance especially with Apple OS. The biggest overhead and Apple OS for the general user is just moving things around in the finder Internet connectivity and network connectivity also play a big factor in performance not from their respective connections but as a whole they can cause things to slow way down as I'm writing you this I'm dictating it through a PowerBook Touch Bar unit with plenty of RAM and hard Drive in as I am dictating it the fans are running super fast because of the heat generated from the extra use of things like voice to text believe it or not. So will be great to see them do some real word testing more people are moving transferring opening and closing webpages plane movies and doing all these things at the same time that we may all do during the course of our day whether that's for business or pleasure Rod data numbers or marketing and can be tweaked. That's giving people the illusion of something that's better than it really is we can take a song with a grain of salt reality is that their OS has some serious flaws especially when it comes to the management of their windows environment and I'm not talking about Microsoft.
They chose simplicity and standardizing in manufacturing rather than the small incremental bump. Streamlining during a chip shortage.
Water cooling and Apple’s emphasis on simplicity and lack of moving parts don’t really go hand-in-hand.
Just because Apple could in theory do something, doesn’t mean they will, especially if you have any understanding of Apple’s design process.