The M1 Benchmarks Continue - Emulated performance appears to *still* outperform any intel-based Mac

[LAwLz]

34 minutes ago, Taf the Ghost said:

At the systematic level, this was actually a move Apple had to make. They basically had to manage two completely separate Ecosystems within a Turn-Key Approach consumer-facing business. They had to bite the bullet and set about the transition. It took them a decade and a solid 11 figures of money to do it. Within 3 years, they'll be completely within their own silicon ecosystem. That's powerful & extremely valuable to them.

 

However, it also means they really aren't competing with Windows, much like they haven't been for years. The Apple ecosystem will stretch from mobile into the two places in Desktop that mattered for 20 years to Apple: Compute Illiterates and Graphic Designers. I've been able to give this exact same advice to people for over 20 years at this point. It's still true. I still wonder how much money Apple was forking over to Adobe to make sure their products ran well on Macs. The PC-versions of Photoshop was a disaster for way, way too long.

 

Anyone heard from the Digital Audio Workstation (DAW) sector? I have a feeling they're going to be very unhappy. 

Why do you think Macs are for "computer illiterates and graphic designers"?

Honestly, with this move I am starting to become interested in Macs and I would say I am "computer litterate", and I am certainly not a graphics designer.

 

I think the generalization you just made about Apple users either being graphic designers or tech illiterate is about as true as saying all Windows users are children who play Fortnite. I think it is very far from the truth.

[Spindel]

1 hour ago, Sakuriru said:

I'm not specifically an Intel/AMD fanboy or anything, but this is very misleading. Allocating memory depends on memory speed and other factors which probably has more to do with their CPU/memory architecture than just the processor itself. If you could take the M1 chip and plug it into your home gaming rig you probably wouldn't get the same result.

 

Similarly I always takes claims about the nanoseconds it takes to do x task like this with a grain of salt. We don't know what other background tasks are running, the OS version, or what kind of CPU scheduling was being used.

 

That said the M1 processor is of course faster. It's 5 nm. And when AMD/Intel catch up they'll see performance gains as well. I guess it's cool for Apple users, but I'm going to be honest the only way this benefits anyone is for people that were using MacOS for creative workloads since MacOS can't be used for games. It doesn't have the same market dominance and their processor doesn't have GPU support, so if you're a gamer you'll be sticking to Windows or be left with a depressing lineup of titles that you can play.

It’s more that it’s interesting that aomething that is done a couple of hundered thousands (if not millions) a second show 5x improvement. Also click on the link and see his comment of emulated x86 being performed at half the time of x86. It all adda up.

[Blademaster91]

47 minutes ago, Taf the Ghost said:

At the systematic level, this was actually a move Apple had to make. They basically had to manage two completely separate Ecosystems within a Turn-Key Approach consumer-facing business. They had to bite the bullet and set about the transition. It took them a decade and a solid 11 figures of money to do it. Within 3 years, they'll be completely within their own silicon ecosystem. That's powerful & extremely valuable to them.

 

However, it also means they really aren't competing with Windows, much like they haven't been for years. The Apple ecosystem will stretch from mobile into the two places in Desktop that mattered for 20 years to Apple: Compute Illiterates and Graphic Designers. I've been able to give this exact same advice to people for over 20 years at this point. It's still true. I still wonder how much money Apple was forking over to Adobe to make sure their products ran well on Macs. The PC-versions of Photoshop was a disaster for way, way too long.

 

Anyone heard from the Digital Audio Workstation (DAW) sector? I have a feeling they're going to be very unhappy. 

While saying macs are for computer illiterates and graphic designers is a generalization,  I think it isn't far too far from being true, the enthusiasts that use macs for Unix compatibility are definitely not the majority of users. And since Apple controls the software and hardware by switching to ARM its going to be more similar to an ipad or iphone, if apple doesn't keep the emulation layer for running x86 apps, apple can control what apps you can run.

 

[Spindel]

1 minute ago, Blademaster91 said:

While saying macs are for computer illiterates and graphic designers is a generalization,  I think it isn't far too far from being true, the enthusiasts that use macs for Unix compatibility are definitely not the majority of users. And since Apple controls the software and hardware by switching to ARM its going to be more similar to an ipad, if apple doesn't keep the emulation layer for running x86 apps, apple can control what apps you can run.

 

TIL I’m computer illiterate

[Qub3d]

2 minutes ago, Blademaster91 said:

While saying macs are for computer illiterates and graphic designers is a generalization,  I think it isn't far too far from being true, the enthusiasts that use macs for Unix compatibility are definitely not the majority of users. And since Apple controls the software and hardware by switching to ARM its going to be more similar to an ipad or iphone, if apple doesn't keep the emulation layer for running x86 apps, apple can control what apps you can run.

 

My entire company develops software on Macbooks. They are huge in the app development space, due to both the wide ecosystem of devtools and the need to have xcode to publish iOS Apps.

[Commodus]

38 minutes ago, Taf the Ghost said:

However, it also means they really aren't competing with Windows, much like they haven't been for years. The Apple ecosystem will stretch from mobile into the two places in Desktop that mattered for 20 years to Apple: Compute Illiterates and Graphic Designers. I've been able to give this exact same advice to people for over 20 years at this point. It's still true. I still wonder how much money Apple was forking over to Adobe to make sure their products ran well on Macs. The PC-versions of Photoshop was a disaster for way, way too long.

To add to what LAwLz said:

 

I don't know why a certain subset of the tech community has this weird belief that ease of use and making computing accessible are bad things, like you have to wade through complexity to feel good about yourself. It's almost a masochistic kink: "harder to use, baby, harder! Less intuitive!"

 

I'm very much tech-literate and use a Mac. Why? Not just because it suits my workflow, but because it gets out of my way and lets me focus on what I want to do. Not that Windows 10 is a hellscape (I'd certainly use it if I had to), but you still have to deal with the occasional driver issue and other headaches.

[Blademaster91]

12 minutes ago, Qub3d said:

My entire company develops software on Macbooks. They are huge in the app development space, due to both the wide ecosystem of devtools and the need to have xcode to publish iOS Apps.

Good point I missed that, apple likes to make app development easy on mac to get users into their ecosystem, if you already rely on the ecosystem there isnt really a way to switch to windows or linux, but there are probably some users that need x86 compatibility, or an eGPU for their work.

[wanderingfool2]

11 hours ago, Qub3d said:

Since this version of Geekbench is running through Apple's translation layer Rosetta 2, an impact on performance is to be expected. Rosetta 2 running x86 code appears to be achieving 78%-79% of the performance of native Apple Silicon code.

Despite the impact on performance, the single-core Rosetta 2 score results still outperforms any other Intel Mac, including the 2020 27-inch iMac with Intel Core i9-10910 @ 3.6GHz.

The issue with this is Apple has been essentially creating worse case scenario's for the Intel chips for a while now.  The example being the Linus video where they realized the CPU heatsink pretty much floated above the silicon instead of making contact with it. (Even with better thermals it still throttled itself even though it wasn't at the max thermals yet...which does say that either it was software limited or maybe power limited)

 

Actually a better question, that I haven't heard anyone mention yet...how much of this is OS software improvements/management.  A more well optimized OS (and even microcode) might make up for performance as well.  An example being this: https://www.techspot.com/news/78122-report-software-fix-can-double-threadripper-2990wx-performance.html although in this case it was a Windows bug in how they were managing the threads that caused a massive slowdown.  Small tweaks at the OS level can make drastic changes to the performance (and as Apple clearly didn't show much care to thermals and such, I wouldn't be surprised if they optimized the OS more for their silicon on chip while still running Intel's which could have affected performance as well). 

 

With that said, I am glad that the performance per watt is better (that is something that really was needed for Laptops)...although I am thinking laptop screens are a major culprit of battery life drain for many laptops out there.

[RedRound2]

1 hour ago, Taf the Ghost said:

However, it also means they really aren't competing with Windows, much like they haven't been for years. The Apple ecosystem will stretch from mobile into the two places in Desktop that mattered for 20 years to Apple: Compute Illiterates and Graphic Designers. I've been able to give this exact same advice to people for over 20 years at this point. It's still true. I still wonder how much money Apple was forking over to Adobe to make sure their products ran well on Macs. The PC-versions of Photoshop was a disaster for way, way too long.

What do you mean they aren't competing with Windows. Mac computers, especially now with Apple exclusive M1 will compete with Windows from end user perspective by presenting themselves as better option than WIndows counterparts. Till now they used to only compete on pure external hardware and operating system. whil the innards remained the same across all general computers. Now they can also flex about the internals.

 

Also what in the world does "Macs are for computer illiterate" mean? Lot's and lot's of people use Macs. Their software and operating system is of value to many people. And having multiple Apple products is one of the cornerstone features that makes so many people's workflow easier. The fact that you just generalized a whole category (and users) like that is quite ignorant of you

[Kisai]

6 hours ago, leadeater said:

 

Apple for sure is working on higher power SoC designs that will have better I/O options and will target higher end SKUs of product lines, I don't know when but there will be Mac Mini's with 10Gb again.

 

I sure hope whatever goes into the Mac Pro... if the Mac Pro survives this transition (look at how long it took them to update the 2010 Mac Pro) actually eats Intel's lunch. But I also feel that if Apple was serious about high end workstation stuff, they might not transition it to ARM at all, as they would have to produce one chip just for the Mac Pro, or expand their high end offerings to be serious competition. 

 

Like, I've said, even though I was skeptical of Apple having a good excuse to drop Intel short of Intel not offering something compelling, which means that the ARM parts were going to go into the low-end offerings like the MacBook Air and MacMini first (which is exactly what happened.) Globally, we've also been expecting some kind of transition away from x86 in both embedded and portable/mobile devices because of the desire for longer battery life. So even Microsoft going back into ARM makes sense too.

 

Though I remain skeptical about ARM having a place in a high end workstation or server, as it requires a kind of parallelization that just isn't happening from desktop software, and even threaded server workloads tend to be choked by memory bandwidth before they hit the all-cpu core performance bottleneck. 

[Bombastinator]

1 hour ago, LAwLz said:

Why do you think Macs are for "computer illiterates and graphic designers"?

Honestly, with this move I am starting to become interested in Macs and I would say I am "computer litterate", and I am certainly not a graphics designer.

 

I think the generalization you just made about Apple users either being graphic designers or tech illiterate is about as true as saying all Windows users are children who play Fortnite. I think it is very far from the truth.

An incomplete truth perhaps.  For example One thing Apple has that win10 doesn’t is a good command line.  Legacy of BSD roots, but unlike Linux, because it’s maintained in a different way for different reasons it doesn’t have some of the issues Linux does.   

[wanderingfool2]

1 hour ago, Kisai said:

Globally, we've also been expecting some kind of transition away from x86 in both embedded and portable/mobile devices because of the desire for longer battery life.

Honestly, I think for most people if they just turned down screen brightness they would be surprised at how much extra battery life they get.

Seriously, at work I had a more power hungry CPU with more RAM but same battery and everything else was the same.  I got a full day's work (when visiting locations) without needing to charge...whereas the person I was with kept having to plug in.  The biggest difference, full screen brightness vs my screen which was just set slight brighter than enough to not impede my work or hurt my eyes.

 

Similar to phones, I've seen so many people who have their screens cranked up near max.  While I do like seeing more efficient chips, I do feel that there is the elephant in the room (especially when it comes to things like laptops)...if you have a screen that is consuming 15 watts of power changing to more efficient chips will only do you so much good.

[Belgarathian]

11 hours ago, FloRolf said:

This makes me wonder though, why are their higher priced models still on Intel CPU's when the M1 is apparently much faster? 

 

https://www.apple.com/shop/buy-mac/macbook-pro/13-inch

I would imagine it's because the use cases for the entry models and air are far more general than the higher-end models, and as this is a first generation product Apple will want to test the performance and stability in the real-world before slowly replacing the whole line up with the M2, and eventually M3. 

 

I work for a manufacturing company and we do the same thing, except we'll usually pick a region to release a new product, test it in market for a year or two, and then release it globally.

[saltycaramel]

3 hours ago, Blademaster91 said:

While saying macs are for computer illiterates and graphic designers is a generalization,  I think it isn't far too far from being true, the enthusiasts that use macs for Unix compatibility are definitely not the majority of users.

 

 

By this metric everything is “for computer illiterates”. Water, french fries, PCs, Macs...

[LAwLz]

3 hours ago, Blademaster91 said:

While saying macs are for computer illiterates and graphic designers is a generalization,  I think it isn't far too far from being true, the enthusiasts that use macs for Unix compatibility are definitely not the majority of users. And since Apple controls the software and hardware by switching to ARM its going to be more similar to an ipad or iphone, if apple doesn't keep the emulation layer for running x86 apps, apple can control what apps you can run.

But by that logic, Windows is for children who play fortnite and old people who refers to their internet browser as "the blue E". 

Making sweeping generalizations like that doesn't really add anything to the discussion. 

[progamer21]

14 hours ago, Justaphysicsnerd said:

If only Windows on ARM could be like this ! Won't windows on ARM also improve, because if the devs (3rd party ones like Adobe) start to make their apps on ARM for Mac, they can do so for Windows on ARM too right ?

finally apple has "good" performance for something and not just trashy performace for there crazy prices 

[leadeater]

1 minute ago, LAwLz said:

But by that logic, Windows is for children who play fortnite and old people who refers to their internet browser as "the blue E". 

Making sweeping generalizations like that doesn't really add anything to the discussion. 

Well if I were to generalize based on population/sample size all computers are for computer illiterates lol. Like argh, you know what I mean when you work in IT 

[Orangeator]

Personally, I am more interested in the higher end parts that are yet to be released. I want to know what limits "Apple Silicon" can be pushed to. 

[progamer21]

Just now, Orangeator said:

Personally, I am more interested in the higher end parts that are yet to be released. I want to know what limits "Apple Silicon" can be pushed to. 

they still have intel processors for there higher end systems I think

[thechinchinsong]

14 minutes ago, Orangeator said:

Personally, I am more interested in the higher end parts that are yet to be released. I want to know what limits "Apple Silicon" can be pushed to. 

I wonder how long Apple will wait to put those out. There are some complaints already about the limited I/O of the M1 so I'm guessing its whenever they decide to ditch the Intel's 16inch macbook pros they still have up on the store.

[Bombastinator]

3 minutes ago, gabrielcarvfer said:

Apple command line tools are so great that the first thing you do with it is install homebrew...

Noting that this is even possible.  People like to work with what they are used to.  I very much doubt vi and bourneagain shell are popular any more for example.

[Spindel]

https://mobile.twitter.com/mnloona48_/status/1328448391706099712/photo/1

 

EDIT:// cinebench multicore on M1 MBP 

[CarlBar]

26 minutes ago, Spindel said:

https://mobile.twitter.com/mnloona48_/status/1328448391706099712/photo/1

 

EDIT:// cinebench multicore on M1 MBP 

 

While Cinebench isn't a great benchmark, at last where getting some kind of look at multi-core. And i'm not super impressed. yes it's hanging in there just below the R7 1700X. But that means in multi-core workloads it's less than twice as fast per core as an architecture that Intel pretty soundly beat for years and that has been absolutely demolished by recent CPU's, not tom mention where Intel's next generation Architecture is expected to come out.

 

Thats a far cry from the 5x faster per core claims that have been floating about.

[exhaustedbrit]

12 minutes ago, CarlBar said:

Thats a far cry from the 5x faster per core claims that have been floating about.

Not sure where those ridiculous claims are coming from, you might mean the claim about GPU performance being up to 5x over the MBA. But this is a low end 2-port model MacBook Pro which means we're looking at probably less than a 20W as a power budget, it's handily matching Core i9 MacBooks in multithreaded perf and smokes it in single core. This is also a single result - a pinch of salt is the order of the day but these results are objectively impressive.

[LAwLz]

51 minutes ago, KuroNanashi said:

Not sure where those ridiculous claims are coming from, you might mean the claim about GPU performance being up to 5x over the MBA. But this is a low end 2-port model MacBook Pro which means we're looking at probably less than a 20W as a power budget, it's handily matching Core i9 MacBooks in multithreaded perf and smokes it in single core. This is also a single result - a pinch of salt is the order of the day but these results are objectively impressive.

It's a 10 watt quad core part at 3Ghz in a laptop competing with a 95 watt 8 core 16 thread part at 3.4GHz inside a desktop and people aren't impressed when almost matches it in multithreaded workloads? 

At this point I don't think people would even be impressed if it cured cancer and generated electricity rather than consumed it. 

 

It's Apple so it must be bad, right? 

 

For comparison, the 3600 at 4.2GHz gets a cinebench R23 score of around 8500.

So a desktop CPU with 50% more cores, 40% higher clock and 850% higher power consumption is only ~13% faster. 

And people aren't impressed by that? Holy crap...