AMD has not beat Intel until the very latest release, so it makes sense to speak of them beating the market leader.
The M1 also tops the latest Ryazan CPU which came out a week ago, especially considering TDP, so what would it add to the report?
The M1 also tops the latest Ryazan CPU which came out a week ago, especially considering TDP, so what would it add to the report?
Only in single-core performance and performance/watt, and the advantage the M1 has in both of these metrics is pretty much exactly the difference expected between a 7nm and a 5nm process (they’re both being produced by the same fab, after all).
It’s likely we’ll see Apple and AMD compete on pretty much equal terms in the CPU market in the future.
Maybe, maybe not. There's no reliable way to estimate exactly how much improvement AMD would get from moving their design to the same fabrication process that the M1 is using.
I mean, the Ryzen besting the M1 in multi-core performance isn't really surprising when you consider that it's a 16-core/32-thread, 105W desktop CPU vs an 8-core/8-thread (four of which are low power cores), ~25W fanless laptop CPU (looking at the 5950X from the Anandtech review).
Well, neither did Apple - and yet all of the article is about their latest released M1 chip which hasn't even stood the test of time.
Meanwhile we know what Ryzens can do - and per-core performance per Watt is rather close still (IIRC 6W vs. 7-8 power draw at load?).
Both, Apple and AMD use TSMC as manufacture and next gen Ryzen is planned to be a 5nm chip too. When you compare the performance gains of the past generations of Ryzen you would definitely bet that AMD could for sure have a very potent CPU next year.
The M1 is very incredible for sure, but AMD is very much on track with their plannings and delivered 3 years in row.
I see this a lot as if it's just fact or commonly accepted but this is a very specific thing. Certain benchmarks would show Intel holding onto a narrow lead in single core performance (IPC) which is only the top metric in a few scenarios where parallelism isn't of consequence.
And certainly Intel leads in market share by a significant margin, so in that respect AMD hasn't beat Intel yet.
But for a large number of use cases, AMD Zen-based x86 chips been a superior option to Intel at least since Zen 2 if not earlier for many uses (of course - heavy parallelism, improved efficiency, better value, easier to power and cool, etc.)
I remember that when the Meltdown and Spectre Linux benchmarks came in, my boss immediately ordered 50x AMD EPYC servers the same day. Later that week, we tried to buy more but they were already sold out at our usual supplier.
We effectively replaced most of our Xeons with EPYCs within the month, because the Intel performance became unbearable and the AMD CPUs were cheap enough that we didn't need approval.
That said, I still keep some Xeon servers around, because Intel's software and their compiler are so f-ing perfect that MKL+ICC is unavoidable for some parallelized C++ services.
In terms of processing power per dollar, I'm not sure that's true.
The latest release just gave Intel nowhere else to hide with their "it's best for gaming" benchmarks, which seemed somewhat artificial anyway, seeing as how they were generally using massively powerful GPUs at very low resolutions.
(edit - The Zen2 and even Zen+ lines gave people looking for lots of cores a better path than intel, even where single threaded performance was a few percent off. The 3900X launched around the same price as the 10900K with two more cores/4 more threads)
1: Anandtech attempted to estimate the CPU power draw and got to around 10W at single-threaded load and a peak of 27W under compute-intensive load: https://www.anandtech.com/show/16252/mac-mini-apple-m1-teste... - that might mean you'd need "only" 10 M1s to reach the TDP of a current Threadripper
I see the M1 as strong in single core benchmarks, probably because it's an evolution of the iPad's processor, that doesn't do a lot of multitasking, and kinda meh in multicore.
I disconsider geekbench tests because of the disclaimer: "Geekbench 5 is a cross plattform benchmark that heavily uses the systems memory. A fast memory will push the result a lot. The single-core test only uses one CPU core, the amount of cores or hyperthreading ability doesn't count".