And it's doing this while using more than an order of magnitude less power (10W vs. a TDP of 125W for that Intel part).
That's stunning.
That's the wrong conclusion to make. For instance, the Lenovo ThinkBook 14s (with a Ryzen 4800u) with a 15W TDP posts the same Geekbench multicore scores [1] as the M1 Macbook. But the ThinkBook isn't in any way faster than the top-end iMac for real world compute intensive tasks.
The M1 certainly looks efficient, but there's little you can conclude from a single benchmark running for a very short period of time.
And it’s 45% slower in single core.
Most importantly, the M1 is estimated to cost Apple $65, the 4800u is a $300+ part.
This comparison looks at different segments of the fab<>manufacturer<>OEM relationship. Add the user in there and you might say that you can buy an AMD CPU for $100 but an Apple CPU will cost you $1000. Not very meaningful as a comparison.
Two and a half times higher cost to build a slower, more power hungry CPU is not actually very similar.
You can argue that this particular Ryzen has a higher gross margin, say 50%, and lower ASP than $300, but that only gets your cost down to what, $140? And with RAM costing extra.
https://www.anandtech.com/show/16226/apple-silicon-m1-a14-de...
I imagine they will eventually have enough chips to start binning for different performance levels like AMD and Intel do.
The benchmark is just ... that accurate.
They are not binning for how high the cores will clock, which is just how business is done with Intel and AMD.
That said, it's promising and I'm really curious to see where this development will lead to in a few years' time.
iOS/iPhones/iPads already smoke every other device in running javascript. Apple Silicon may end up being the best thing to ever happen for Electron apps.
Does the M1 performance have to be ramped down during sustained use due to exceeding thermal envelope of the fanless MBA? Of the fan’d MBP?
We’ll know soon enough!
Nevertheless, because Apple has chosen to not increase their manufacturing costs by including more big cores, the multi-threaded performance is not at all impressive, being lower than that of many much cheaper laptops using AMD Ryzen 7 4800U CPUs.
So for any professional applications, like software development, these new Apple computers will certainly not blow away their competition performance-wise, and that before taking into account their severe limitations in memory capacity and peripheral ports.
But the truth is comparing to future offerings is bullshit, and we have to stick to what's available today. Impressive power/performance and all that, I have to say. We will see how sustained load looks like and how it runs non-optimized software. But to put in perspective 1 CCX of zen 3 performs better on 7nm (but draws up to 65W). With approximately the same die size (although w/o GPU and other things, the M1 has).
The fanless Intel Core-M CPUs could post excellent benchmark scores (for its time). But if you give it a lengthy compile task, it'll slow down dramatically.
Or are you saying that the test needs to run for way longer to be fair?
Yes, the main computing constraint of mobile devices is heat management (This doesn't really reflect the CPU but the complete device. Putting the CPU in a more ideal setup like a traditional desktop or water cooling will improve the CPU's performance in longer tasks)
Short duration single core workloads workout a fan is trivial even for CPUs that aren't trying to do so.