DuhSesame

MacPro said:

I'm sure Jony will be vey successful at what ever he does.  It seems his push for everything Apple make to be thinner and lighter went a wee bit too far, but that could well be more Intel's fault than his.  With Apple Silicon, Jony's svelte designs may well make a come back in the years to come, I suspect.

MacQuadra840av said:

mjtomlin said:

I have a feeling the current M1 systems were a stop-gap solution using current designs to get them on the market and in users' hands as soon as possible. 

No.  They are not a stop-gap solution.  Apple made the mistake of having the first M-based Macs be the most basic and low-cost models, instead of upgrading their most popular models first.  You know, like they did with the first Intel Macs, the iMac and the 15" MacBook Pro.

sunman42 said:

DuhSesame said:

Just did some quick search on Geekbench 5:

Here's what really looks like when comparing to the 16-inch MacBook Pro (Highest vs. Highest)

7695 for the Air vs. 7346 for the 16-inch.

Here's the iMac with Core i7-9700

7695 vs. 7559.

M1 pulls slightly ahead on both, but worth noting that neither is high for an eight-core.  both 9700K/9900K pulls way ahead the competition.

So it's slightly disappointing comparing to what we used to hear, it didn't smash x86's eight-core by that much.  Then again, it's a quad-core (4x4) with 15~20W of CPU power.  Both the 9980HK & 9700 needs to pull at least ~60W to match.


Edit: It's also important to remember the 16-inch or the iMac still have to deal with thermal throttling, where the M1 could be free from that issue.  @mike_wuerthele I'd like to see a thermal test, thanks.

Well here's the cinebench loop on Twitter:

https://twitter.com/_rogame/status/1328721464040820738

This comment and the article both err in comparing the "8-core" M1 to the machines (say, the 8-core i9 in the MBPro 16). Remember that only four of those 8 (4 + 4) cores in the M1 are high performance, and the other four cores are designed to do less CPU-intensive chores at considerably lower power draw. The M1-based systems' multi-core results are particularly impressive when viewed this way.

It might also be instructive to compare the power draw on the machines over the time they're running these benchmarks.

By the way, I'm typing this in front of a 10-core Intel iMac, and it's yet to hit any thermal throttling. The again, I've yet to do any 8K video editing on it.

hmlongco said:

DuhSesame said:

So it's slightly disappointing comparing to what we used to hear, it didn't smash x86's eight-core by that much.  Then again, it's a quad-core (4x4) with less than 20W of CPU power.  Both the 9980HK & 9700 needs to pull at least ~60W to match.

So you don't find it that impressive that the FOUR high-performance cores, helped by four efficiency cores, managed to beat out an i9's EIGHT cores (actually, 16 with hyper-threading)???