MateBook X Pro vs M1 MacBook Air - Pretty insane...

[TheReal1980]

Summary

Matebook X Pro vs the Macbook Air.

The Huawei laptop uses the 11th Gen. Intel i7-1165G7 (2.8GHz, Turbo up to 4.7GHz) with latest Xe graphics but even with that it seems it is no match for the Macbook Air (which has no active cooling).

To be fair the Matebook X seems to be a pretty good product overall.

 

Quotes

Quote

In this video, we compare basically everything between the new MateBook X Pro and the M1 MacBook Air to see which laptop is the best in 2021. We go through things like performance, displays, speakers, keyboards, trackpads, battery life and much more!

 

My thoughts

It is insane that this is the M1, the first version of Apple Silicon, and it STILL does this good.

The thing that blew me away the most is the test for the Photoshop Super Resolution (which uses the Neural Engine in the M1) and the battery life that was left after all the tests were done (61% vs 15%).

 

Adobe Photoshop's Super Resolution feature is a remarkable technology that uses artificial intelligence to quadruple the size of your photos. It's not perfect, but it's a great way to breathe new life into older shots and to print photos larger with twice the number of pixels in both width and height.

 

Sources

 

[TheReal1980]

Again...

Photoshop Super Resolution Test

Apple: 13 seconds.

Huawei: 10+ minutes.

 

48 TIMES FASTER...

 

I wonder if we could use this tech in games in the future, would that be possible? Either way it is very interesting.

[ki8aras]

10 minutes ago, TheReal1980 said:

Again...

Photoshop Super Resolution Test

Apple: 13 seconds.

Huawei: 10+ minutes.

 

48 TIMES FASTER...

 

I wonder if we could use this tech in games in the future, would that be possible? Either way it is very interesting.

i doubt it could be feasibly used for realtime rendering however it could help with smaller downloads(download a crappy texture and upscale it)

[TheReal1980]

1 minute ago, ki8aras said:

i doubt it could be feasibly used for realtime rendering however it could help with smaller downloads(download a crappy texture and upscale it)

Yeah you are probably correct. Maybe it would be able to make browsing the internet better with crappy images being improved, that would be awesome. I never really thought much about that part of the M1 chip but it seems interesting...

[leadeater]

Not sure why/how this is new information? The 1165G7 has been out for a while and a lot of laptops use it, it and the 1185G7 get trounced by Ryzen also. Just seems like another review and one out of release news cycle at that so 

[Zodiark1593]

2 hours ago, ki8aras said:

i doubt it could be feasibly used for realtime rendering however it could help with smaller downloads(download a crappy texture and upscale it)

Could be used for emulation to code textures at a higher resolution before runtime. 

[thechinchinsong]

1 hour ago, leadeater said:

Not sure why/how this is new information? The 1165G7 has been out for a while and a lot of laptops use it, it and the 1185G7 get trounced by Ryzen also. Just seems like another review and one out of release news cycle at that so 

Yeah, its not really surprising that a Tiger Lake chip that doesn't even perform that well against Ryzen gets trounced by the M1. I guess the newsworthy info here is that Huawei still have decent ultrabooks (at least relative to other Tiger Lake ultrabooks)?

[tikker]

2 hours ago, TheReal1980 said:

Again...

Photoshop Super Resolution Test

Apple: 13 seconds.

Huawei: 10+ minutes.

 

48 TIMES FASTER...

 

I wonder if we could use this tech in games in the future, would that be possible? Either way it is very interesting.

2 hours ago, TheReal1980 said:

which uses the Neural Engine in the M1

Does this mean it's hardware accelerated on M1 and not on the MBXP? In that case I'm not surprised at all. Still a great benefit of course, but more an apples to oranges comparison in that case.

[Spindel]

1 hour ago, tikker said:

Does this mean it's hardware accelerated on M1 and not on the MBXP? In that case I'm not surprised at all. Still a great benefit of course, but more an apples to oranges comparison in that case.

The thing is that since the NE part is a standard thing in AS (has been for a couple of years and most probably will be in the future) all software written for apple devices will be able to use it. No matter of it’s on iPhone or a future $10000 AS Mac Pro. So that benefit will be available to everything on AS and not locked behind some higher tier hardware. 
 

While NE is designed for and good at ML it still is a couple of billion transistors that can be used for certain GC tasks by smart programmers. 
 

[Laborant]

1 hour ago, tikker said:

Does this mean it's hardware accelerated on M1 and not on the MBXP? In that case I'm not surprised at all. Still a great benefit of course, but more an apples to oranges comparison in that case.

Yes, software (or GPU accelerated) Neural processing is slower than a dedicated neural processing engine - on this standpoint, it's apples to oranges. But as the laptop as a whole in its form factor tries to compete with the (fanless) MacBook Air, it still can be seen as an oranges to oranges comparison.

The M1 chips are very good - but is it news that it still beats basically the entire competition in anything it can do? I'd prefer to have news about a Windows based ultrabook that can scrub through 8K raw videos like an M1 does. 

[tikker]

35 minutes ago, Spindel said:

The thing is that since the NE part is a standard thing in AS (has been for a couple of years and most probably will be in the future) all software written for apple devices will be able to use it. No matter of it’s on iPhone or a future $10000 AS Mac Pro. So that benefit will be available to everything on AS and not locked behind some higher tier hardware. 
 

While NE is designed for and good at ML it still is a couple of billion transistors that can be used for certain GC tasks by smart programmers. 
 

24 minutes ago, Laborant said:

Yes, software (or GPU accelerated) Neural processing is slower than a dedicated neural processing engine - on this standpoint, it's apples to oranges. But as the laptop as a whole in its form factor tries to compete with the (fanless) MacBook Air, it still can be seen as an oranges to oranges comparison.

The M1 chips are very good - but is it news that it still beats basically the entire competition in anything it can do? I'd prefer to have news about a Windows based ultrabook that can scrub through 8K raw videos like an M1 does. 

 

Yeah I agree. I'm just saying that I'm not surprised that the same task using hardware acceleration is insanely faster than without hardware acceleration. It's like saying the 3080 with dedicated RT cores being 100 times faster than a 1080 Ti at ray tracing is news while ignoring that it has dedicated hardware for it; of course it's faster that way. Of course having this makes the MacBook a very attractive unit and I fully supportit. If there is room for hardware acceleration then by all means go for it. The less we have to wait for processing the better.

[leadeater]

3 hours ago, thechinchinsong said:

I guess the newsworthy info here is that Huawei still have decent ultrabooks (at least relative to other Tiger Lake ultrabooks)?

Not like I'd ever buy one from them lol

[leadeater]

1 hour ago, Laborant said:

on this standpoint, it's apples to oranges.

hehehe please let this have been intentional 

[Helpful Tech Witch]

3 hours ago, leadeater said:

hehehe please let this have been intentional 

More like apples to flowers.....

(ill be here all.... well... all the time)

[Arika]

the issue with both of these laptops is that the key travel is WAY to shallow on both. Last time i was in a store i trying typing on them (made sure it was the M1 so no butterfly keyboard) and holy shit they both felt like utter shit like the keys didn't move at all

[Obioban]

15 hours ago, tikker said:

 

Yeah I agree. I'm just saying that I'm not surprised that the same task using hardware acceleration is insanely faster than without hardware acceleration. It's like saying the 3080 with dedicated RT cores being 100 times faster than a 1080 Ti at ray tracing is news while ignoring that it has dedicated hardware for it; of course it's faster that way. Of course having this makes the MacBook a very attractive unit and I fully supportit. If there is room for hardware acceleration then by all means go for it. The less we have to wait for processing the better.

It's not really hardware accelerated like, say, a hardware H.264 encoder or ray tracing cores. It's more like having tasks that run on the GPU-- faster at certain types of computation. The M1, for it's class, has a pretty kickass CPU cores and GPU cores and ML cores, with tasks being distributed to whatever handles them the best. It also has some specific hardware acceleration (e.g. H.264).

[tikker]

4 minutes ago, Obioban said:

It's not really hardware accelerated like, say, a hardware H.264 encoder or ray tracing cores. It's more like having tasks that run on the GPU-- faster at certain types of computation. The M1, for it's class, has a pretty kickass CPU cores and GPU cores and ML cores, with tasks being distributed to whatever handles them the best. It also has some specific hardware acceleration (e.g. H.264).

Offloading calculations to a GPU or ML cores is still hardware acceleration as you are offloading it to hardware better suited for those particular tasks.

[Obioban]

1 minute ago, tikker said:

Offloading calculations to a GPU or ML cores is still hardware acceleration as you are offloading it to hardware better suited for those particular tasks.

Yeah, it's just not limited like feature specific hardware accelerators. 

[tikker]

8 minutes ago, Obioban said:

Yeah, it's just not limited like feature specific hardware accelerators. 

Naturally. Extremely feature specific optimisation only makes sense (from a consumer device perspective) for ubiquitous tasks like your example of H264 or H265 decoding that pretty much everybody will use. I can see this super resolution thing having a reasonably wide usebase and there is / will be other stuff I assume that can leverate the ML cores as well. It's fine to have hardware acceleration that is still general though. I mean a GPU can be used for loads of things, yet is still miles ahead of a CPU in the right workload.

 

My opinion was just that a true apples to apples comparison would be the same task running on the M1's CPU cores. However, I understand this comparison is hard in the first place simply because the difference in architecture / design alone, so it's fine. Like I said this does make it an attractive option for artists or content creators. As technology keeps improving we'll undoudbtedly see the line between "normal" and "accelerated" blur as more things like this pop up. I mean, we already don't even consider gaming as being "hardware accelerated" by the GPU anymore since it has become unthinkable of running games on just the CPU nowadays.

[avg123]

how does chrome work for the two laptops? Is Macbook better? thats the most important performance metric for 90% of people

[tikker]

54 minutes ago, avg123 said:

how does chrome work for the two laptops? Is Macbook better? thats the most important performance metric for 90% of people

Anything you buy will run Chrome. People are not on the fence between an M1 macbook or the MBXP wondering which one would run Chrome better.

[XGoodGuyFitz]

Wow, the macbook seems to be really good. Atleast they improved over the 2019 one(isnt that the one that has heating issues because of no connecting heat pipes to the cpu?)

[avg123]

Just now, tikker said:

Anything you buy will run Chrome. People are not on the fence between an M1 macbook or the MBXP wondering which one would run Chrome better.

performance matters when you have 10 extensions installed. laptop can slow down considerably. 

[Commodus]

1 minute ago, XGoodGuyFitz said:

Wow, the macbook seems to be really good. Atleast they improved over the 2019 one(isnt that the one that has heating issues because of no connecting heat pipes to the cpu?)

I believe the early 2020 Intel models also had heat issues, although the performance was still much better than for previous Air systems.

 

The M1 models are something else, to the point where you wonder why anyone buying something in the Air's category would buy anything else unless they insisted on Windows.

[BondiBlue]

6 minutes ago, XGoodGuyFitz said:

Wow, the macbook seems to be really good. Atleast they improved over the 2019 one(isnt that the one that has heating issues because of no connecting heat pipes to the cpu?)

The 2018, 2019, and 2020 Intel MacBook Airs don't have proper cooling, so they're all known to run very hot.