>Those machines are just standing around in their underwear now because the M1 stole all their pants.
Not sure what shitty machine hes talking about, but my threadripper's are not impressed with some 4 core M1.
Not sure what shitty machine hes talking about, but my threadripper's are not impressed with some 4 core M1.
You're quite right, your machine and in fact everyone else's are still just as good as they were a few weeks ago. I got an Intel 5K iMac in the summer and I'm still very happy with it. I need to be able to run windows and Linux in VMs so M1 isn't for me right now. It's no for you either.
Having said that, your manufacturer of your Threadripper is now on notice. Apple isn't done with the M1, more powerful desktop chips are on their way over the next few years and there's a very good chance they'll do exactly what they just did to Intel and AMDs mobile chipsets to the high end stuff. Apple are coming for them, and not being impressed now isn't going to serve them well down the line.
Going back to versatility, there's no way that AWS or Azure is going to move to Apple silicon for their infrastructure, so there's still a massive market for AMD or other Arm manufacturers to target. For the consumer side unless Apple releases a chip that results in them making a sub-$800 laptop, they're just simply not going to capture a large market. With the rise of devices like Chromebooks in education and home there's still something to be said for Apple devices just being too expensive.
In general, Apple devices also leave a LOT to be desired for any sort of large scale enterprise organization. Unless they go back to their 90's and early 00's mindset, I just can't see this changing.
It's certainly exciting to see the CPU market being upended by Apple and AMD, as well as the potential future for a large architecture shift, but I don't think there's any real threat to market shares as a whole.
AWS already have a series of AArch64 instance-types which they will most likely continue to improve.
This is exactly what Apple did with the iPad, nowadays you can get a very decently specced 10.2” iPad with their 2018 CPU for $309. That’s astonishing, but it’s a great way for Apple to get extended value out of their silicon.
But claiming that what’s available today from Apple is of great interest to the high performance market is jumping the gun.
There’s also the fact that cost (including peripherals and support) and software availability, not performance and efficiency, are what guide most PC purchases. The M1’s advantages are far less pronounced in those areas.
I think that misses the point that most users (and most software developers in particular) use laptops. The M1 SOC pretty well kills everything CPU-wise, and does graphics as well as a GT 1050 discrete GPU. It also throws in AI silicon and RAM, and runs all of it in a 20W (or so) power budget.
Single-thread performance is quite comparable to a Threadripper.
It'll be interesting to see how things look when M1 style silicon is introduced for the 16" Macbook Pro (guessing 8 performance cores, 32 GB RAM), and the Mac Pro (guessing up to 32 performance cores, and at least 64 GB RAM used as cache for a potentially much larger main memory).
> There’s also the fact that cost (including peripherals and support) and software availability, not performance and efficiency, are what guide most PC purchases. The M1’s advantages are far less pronounced in those areas.
Actually as to cost, it's highly competitive in the premium laptop segment (like Dell XPS for instance).
Software availability is good, since it'll run almost all Intel Mac software, all M1 Mac software (soon to be ~everything), and all ARM-compatible Linux software (ARM Linux runs in a VM).
The only thing missing is Windows, and that may well be temporary.
I'd say if you're doing web, Mac or Linux software development the Apple Silicon Macs are the wave of the future! :-)
This move is very Nintendo-like. Gimmick then don't even attempt to compete with the big dogs.
The fanboys have their meat to chew on "it's not hot". And they will repeat it on command as Apple falls behind to a swath of competition. "It might be slow, but at least it doesn't warm my lap."
Apple just dropped hardware which crushes every comparable competitor.
But to you, Nintendo is not competing by "making more money", and Apple is "falling behind" by ... jumping years ahead? This reads like personal axe-grinding that is detached from any objective link to the market.
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/10/28/sonys-second-quarter-profit-...
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/11/05/nintendo-raises-switch-forec...
Well, they just pantsed Microsoft at their own ARM laptop game (#2 most valuable) and the #1 big dog is, er, Saudi Aramco.
To me, this means that when Apple consciously goes after the high end desktop market, they are likely to overshoot in exactly the same way M1 overshot the mid range mobile space. That could put Apple’s high end iMac chips in Mac Pro territory anyway.
The M1 has 8 CPU cores, 8 GPU cores and 16 Neural Engine cores. It also runs at 10 watts and maxes out at 24 watts. A Threadripper starts at over 100 watts…
Not sure if it maxes out at 24 watts. Someone measured wall power of a Mac Mini hitting 21 watts at full load, but that's including power supply inefficiency, all of the supporting circuitry and IO, a fan, flash storage, etc.
I think you're underselling the small cores a bit. Their microarchitecture is roughly comparable to a Cortex-A75, which was the high-performance cores in Snapdragon 845 phones like the Samsung Galaxy S9. But Apple clocks them about 26% slower than the SD845 did, so maybe we should be comparing against Galaxy S8 instead: flagship Android performance from 3 years ago. That's capable of a lot more than just casual background processing. Samsung introduced their DeX docking station for smartphone-powered desktop usage back with the S8 generation, when their phones only had as much computational power as the Apple M1's smaller cores.
The Firestorm cores in the M1 are 4.5X faster at SPECfp than the Icestorm cores. The Firestorm cores in the M1 are 3.1X faster at SPECint than the Icestorm cores.
In my world, the 3.1 - 4.5X faster sibling makes them very low performance, relatively. In a fully working together scenario, the "8" core M1 is equal in performance to a conceptual 4.5 core Firestorm part (see the Geekbench scaling, for instance). This, again, has positively nothing to do with any other core or part.
Bizarre that anyone thinks this is somehow negative or dismissive of the M1. It is an extraordinary chip. But they intentionally, purposefully put 4 very low performance -- compared to Firestorm -- cores because it matches the computing model of users average workload.
Power users understand today that max MHZ doesn't even matter anymore, for various reasons.
I think power consumption (even in desktops, servers) will be a large factor / marketing number.
I think the big tech sites will continue to hammer home some type of "CPU work / watt" type metric, which is roughly like "time to complete some standardized workload vs. power used to do it"
People buying a threadripper today don't care about it.
What matters to them it's the performance, my gf is a 3d artist, she doesn't care if some cpu consumes more or less power than another (when I say she doesn't care I mean she doesn't even know that CPU have very different power requirements), she needs the fastest gear she can buy on her budget.
Apple M1s are not it.
There are many other that do not care because the hardware stays at the office, where someone else pays the bills and they too don't care because the electricity bill is the last of their problems, fixing it buying more efficient computing devices would mean spending a lot of money in advance to replace at least half of the stock.
How many more months of electricity could that money pay?
A lot.
People buying Apple for its M1 low power consumption are a niche inside a niche.
So I think the reasoning stands: Apple M1s are not a real threat for its competitors because the market that really cares about its strengths is smaller than the one that doesn't and Apple will keep to largely miss the second one.
Also, the fact that the M1 is even being mentioned along with a desktop powerhouse like the threadripper says it all. The M1 is the lowest end mobile Apple Silicon. We know higher end mobile chips are coming along with desktop ones. The M1 has put all the chip manufacturers on notice, much the same the way the iPhone did (to the point RIM thought Apple was lying about the iPhone because they thought the device was impossible).
Now if we look at what people are buying and ask ourselves 'are these the people who care about TDP?' the answer is simply 'no'
The majority of laptops sold are sub 700, as the previous post said, low budget, low power and in education, markets that Apple has never even considered (except education, but it's mainly college students in USA)
Not saying M1 aren't good, but that they won't shake the market as NVidia buying ARM could
P.s. M1 is a Zen 3 competitor, threadripper has been mentioned for the exact opposite reason: because that's the state of the art for people looking at performances in personal computing (while in HPC ARM is prominent)
This is a joke. The M1s performance is no where near the threadripper. Even on per-thread performance, new AMD cpus perform better than the M1... and they have many more cores. The M1 can only win these comparisons when we start adding all kinds of conditions, like power draw, heat, price point, etc. They need to add those conditions to redirect the conversation, because on raw performance threadripper destroys the M1.
The article made the mistake of leaving out those conditions to make it seem even more impressive than it is... but hyperbole and fantasy will always sound better than reality. Reality requires those conditions. That doesn't detract from the m1's impressiveness.. but it's foolish to forget that and go off and start making ridiculous claims like the article has done.
I don't do the most intensive tasks on thin, battery-powered computers for a reason. I try to do those on the box that's always plugged into mains power with heatsinks and fans as needed, plenty of ports to plug things in, and a big monitor. A more performant portable computer is awesome, but until I can spend a similar amount to make my workstation smaller without losing capability, I'll likely keep using it for heavy lifting alongside a cheaper, less powerful laptop or tablet for lighter work or remoting in.
> Apple M1s are not it.
If a person had a $1000 budget, they could by an M1 equipped laptop from Apple. Is there something significantly faster at that price?
I just looked at Dell and an XPS desktop with 16 GB of RAM starts at $650. You aren't going to be able to add two GPUs and a monitor for $350.
At HP you can get to 32 GB for $650 but again you still need to buy GPUs and a monitor.
A lot of studios sell their old GPU (as in a generation ago) for cheap
If you stay out of vertical integrated supply chains you can buy the best your budget allows
If you are saying that you cannot assemble a laptop of the same quality of an Apple one, I agree
If you are saying that Apple laptops are what people want because they consume 20 watt full load, I disagree
The market of the good enough products is always gonna be larger than 'the best money can buy'
Apple will never make 'good enough products' hence they are not competing with the bulk of what is being sold right now
It could change in the future, but not in the immediate future IMO
Not all RAM is equivalent. If one wants 64GB of the kind of RAM M1 uses, which is very high performance, it will cost more than 300 euros.
I guarantee that 64GB does not cost anything near EUR300.
You might be thinking of HBM[2] which has a wider I/O path and costs more.
showed https://www.cpu-monkey.com/en/cpu-apple_m1-1804
which determined the M1's memory is LPDDR4X-4266 or LPDDR5-5500. If those memories are not high performance, what is?
Who cares if an M1 consumes less energy than a candle if I can buy 64GB of DDR4 3600 for 250 bucks and render the VFX for a 2 hours movie in 4k?
Another 300 bucks buy me a second GPU
When I deliver the job I put aside another 300 bucks and buy a third GPU
Or a better CPU
vertical products are an absolute waste of money when you chase the last bit of performance to save time (for you and your clients) and don't have the budget of Elon Musk
The M1 changes nothing in that space
Which is also a very lucrative space where every hour saved is an hour billed doing a new job instead of waiting to finish the last one to get paid
You can't mount your old gear on a rack and use it as a rendering node, plus you're paying for things you don't need: design, thermal constraints, a very expensive panel (a very good one, but still attached to the laptop body, and small)
So no, M1 is not comparable to a Threadripper, it's not even close, even if it consumes a lot more energy
When I'll see the same performances and freedom to upgrade in 20W chips, I will be the first one to buy them!
https://www.newegg.com/corsair-64gb-288-pin-ddr4-sdram/p/N82...
Then there's the 92% (actually 92.4%) of the remaining market that is not using an Apple computer that will keep buying non Apple hardware
Even if Apple doubled their market share, it would still be 15% Vs 85%
How is it possible that on HN people don't realise that 90 is much bigger than 10 and it's not a new laptop that will overturn the situation in a month is beyond me
Ummm... ok. But my comment was not all RAM is equivalent.
I guess you don't drive a Ferrari or a Murciélago
And does it really matter to have a faster car if you can't use it to go camping with your family because space is limited?
That's what an Apple gives you, but it's not even a Ferrari, it's more like an Alfa Duetto
It's not expensive if you compare it to similar offers in the same category with the same constraints (which are artificially imposed on Macs like there's no other way to use a computer...)
But if you compare it to the vast amount of better configurations that the same money can buy, it is not
Yeah… no, those days are over. The reviews clearly show the M1 Macs, including the MacBook Pro outperform most "desktops" at graphics-intensive tasks.
>So no, M1 is not comparable to a Threadripper, it's not even close, even if it consumes a lot more energy
Um… nobody is comparing an M1 Mac to a processor that often costs more than either the M1 Mac mini or MacBook Pro. However, the general consensus is the M1 outperforms PCs with mid to high-end GPUs and CPUs from Intel and AMD. Threadripper is a high-end, purpose build chip that can cost more than complete systems from most other companies, including Apple. However, it's at a cost of power consumption, special cooling in some cases, etc.
>Who cares if an M1 consumes less energy than a candle if I can buy 64GB of DDR4 3600 for 250 bucks and render the VFX for a 2 hours movie in 4k. Another 300 bucks buy me a second GPU
The MacBook Pro has faster LPDDR4X-4266 RAM on a 128-bit wide memory bus. The memory bandwidth maxes out at over 60 GB/s. And because the RAM, CPU and GPU (and all of the other units in the SoC) are all in the same die, memory is extremely fast.
From AnandTech; emphasis mine [1]: "A single Firestorm achieves memory reads up to around 58GB/s, with memory writes coming in at 33-36GB/s. Most importantly, memory copies land in at 60 to 62GB/s depending if you’re using scalar or vector instructions. The fact that a single Firestorm core can almost saturate the memory controllers is astounding and something we’ve never seen in a design before."
It can easily render a 2-hour 4k video unplugged in the background while you're doing other stuff. And when you're done, you’ll still have enough battery to last you until the next day if necessary. According to the AnandTech review [1], it blows away all other integrated GPUs and is even faster than several dedicated GPUs. That's not nothing; and these machines do it for less money.
>vertical products are an absolute waste of money when you chase the last bit of performance to save time (for you and your clients) and don't have the budget of Elon Musk
>The M1 changes nothing in that space
This is not correct… seeing should be believing.
Here's a video of 4k, 6k and 8k RED RAW files being rendered on an M1 Mac with 8 Gb of RAM, using DaVinci Resolve 17 [2]. Spoiler: while the 8k RAW file stuttered a little, once the preview resolution was reduced to only 4k, the playback was smooooth.
[1]: https://www.anandtech.com/show/16252/mac-mini-apple-m1-teste...
Don't get me wrong - this is still very impressive with a ~20w combined! power draw under full load, but it definitely doesn't beat mid - high desktop GPUs.
(This is largely irrelevant for video encoding/decoding though as you can see - as that's mostly done either on the CPU or dedicated silicon living in either the CPU or the GPU that's separate from the main graphics processing cores.)
[0] https://www.macrumors.com/2020/11/16/m1-beats-geforce-gtx-10...
You could build a complete desktop system including a GPU that's more powerful than the one in the M1 for ~$1000, but certainly not a 3080. They're very expensive, and nobody has any in stock anyway.
An RX 580 or 1660 would probably be the right GPU with that budget. (Although you could go with something more powerful and skimp out on CPU and ram if you only cared about gaming performance).
- yes, you totally can. The best thing is that with a 1k.entry level you can start working on real-life projects that have deadlines and start earning money that will let you upgrade your gear to the level you actually need, without having to buy an entire new machine. The old components can serve as spare parts or to build a second node. You don't waste a single penny on things you don't need.
Even though, it's true, you can't brag with friends that it absorbs only 20 watts full load and the heat of the aluminium body is actually pleasant
It's a big sacrifice, I understand it.
They don't!
Cut the BS
> Here's a video of 4k, 6k and 8k RED RAW files being rendered on an M1 Mac
Blablablabla
That's not rendering
AnandTech disagrees with you: https://www.anandtech.com/show/16252/mac-mini-apple-m1-teste...
Besides the additional cores on the part of the CPUs and GPU, one main performance factor of the M1 that differs from the A14 is the fact that’s it’s running on a 128-bit memory bus rather than the mobile 64-bit bus. Across 8x 16-bit memory channels and at LPDDR4X-4266-class memory, this means the M1 hits a peak of 68.25GB/s memory bandwidth.
Later in the article:
Most importantly, memory copies land in at 60 to 62GB/s depending if you’re using scalar or vector instructions. The fact that a single Firestorm core can almost saturate the memory controllers is astounding and something we’ve never seen in a design before.
Dual channel DDR3L or DDR4L also has a 128 bit bus. 4200MHz DDR4 is clocked on the high side for most laptops, sure, but it's hardly unusual.
Run the numbers and you get the exact same throughput figure as for M1, which isn't surprising, because we're just taking width * rate = throughput.
So I'll repeat my assertion, downvotes be damned: the memory on the M1 is not special. The packaging and interconnect is interesting. It might reduce latency a little; it probably reduces power consumption a lot. But there's nothing special about it. The computer you're on right now probably has the same memory subsystem with different packaging.
That’s where they started, but their conclusion was beyond that.
Did you miss the part where they said the fact that a single Firestorm core can almost saturate the memory controllers is astounding and something we’ve never seen in a design before?
This isn’t only about A14 vs M1.
It’s not that LPDDR4X-4266-class memory is special; it’s been around for a while. What is special is that the RAM is part of SoC and due to the unified memory model, the CPU, GPU, Neural Engine and the other units have very fast access to the memory.
This is common for tablets and smartphones; it’s not common for general purpose laptops and desktops. And while Intel and AMD have added more functionality to their processors, they don’t have everything that’s part of the M1 system on a chip:
* Image Processing Unit (ISP) * Digital Signal Processor (DSP) * 16 core Neural Processing Unit (NPU) * Video encoder/decoder * Secure Enclave
There’s no other desktop such as the M1 Mac mini that combines all of these features with this level of performance at the price point of $699.
That is special.
I don't think that's notable, sorry. I would expect that of any modern CPU.
> it’s not common for general purpose laptops and desktops
Well, yeah, because "memory on package" has major disadvantages. You (laptop/desktop manufacturer) are making minor gains in performance and power and need to buy a CPU which doesn't exist. Apple can do it, but they were already doing it for iPhone, and they must do it for iPhone to meet space constraints.
I think unified memory is the right way to go, long term, and that's a meaningful improvement. But as you point out, there is plenty of prior work there.
> they don’t have everything that’s part of the M1 system on a chip
They actually do! The 'CPU' part of an Intel CPU is vanishingly small these days. Most area is taken up with cache, GPU and hardware accelerators, such as... hardware video encode and decode, image processing, security and NN acceleration.
Most high-end Android cellphone SoCs have the same blocks. NVIDIA's SoCs have been shipping the same hardware blocks, with the same unified memory architecture, for at least four years. They all boot Ubuntu and give a desktop-like experience on a modern ARM ISA.
> There’s no other desktop ... at the price point of $699
Literally every modern Intel desktop does this.
The best that money can buy changes when you put the actual budget. Today, Apple may be the best that $1000 can buy.
Em NO, the M1's are not comparable with a workstation class laptops (not cpu wise nor ram...and especially not GPU wise)
Got it, watching Netflix in Chrome without the laptop getting hot is "a niche inside a niche" while GPU intensive 3d graphics workflows are mainstream.
Don't need no M1
AMD and Nvidia have sold more GPUs than Apple laptops by a large margin
Well then i have to say Apple achieved what my 7 year old nexus 5 already could...bravo.
Of course I'm sure you can find laptops with terrible cooling design that would get uncomfortably hot watching Netflix, but there's plenty of thin and light laptops available for < $1000 that would do just fine too.
https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/311995-japans-new-arm-ba...
I think his point about moving the bounds of the power (and heat) / performance tradeoff is valid.
Anandtech ran the numbers a couple years ago and an EPYC processor spent around 60% of its budget on Infinity Fabric (up to 90% of used power with only a couple cores being used).
An M2 based chip might get more done, but it won't use much less power. In truth, I'd guess there's a good chance it bottlenecks on the IO and performance doesn't increase as expected (without widening IO further with all the extra power costs).
Gruber greatly exaggerates here. Particularly mentioning the Mac Pro in the same paragraph.
Apple's M1 isn't competing with higher end Intel/ AMD desktop class CPUs with external GPUs. The M1 is a laptop CPU, designed for good performance with good thermals and excellent battery life. It will be interesting to see what they come up with over the next couple years to replace the CPU in the iMac and Mac Pro. But that is next year.
As it stands right now, I have an 18 month old 27" iMac with 64GB ram and an AMD gpu - and an 8GB M1. And I'm preferring the M1 for almost any task that doesn't demand the real estate.
It will not, my TR has 64 cores 128 Thread and you know whats the best thing? 128GB Ram...and imagine that..they aren't even soldered...and i even can exchange my GPU..or slap in 2 others.
And if apple ever brings out a M1 Workstation, i can probably buy 3 other Server/Workstations with that money.
Firestorm Cores use less than 4 watts each. A 16 firestorm core Mx will produce roughly the same multicore performance as your TR, with a less than 70 watt TDP.
And a $65 M1 dusts a 4800h that costs over 4x as much and using 1/3 the power. Top end ThreadRippers cost $2,000 to $3,000 each. You can bet an Apple Mx ThreadRipper killer isn’t going to cost more than $500 given it only needs 4x the cores of the $65 M1.
I suspect we'll never know. Apple have shown little interest in anything other than prosumer workloads for a long time. I doubt they'll be making an M1 server platform anytime soon.
It's possible Apple just doesn't think the investment in a 30 core CPU is worthwhile and stops around 16 cores, which would still be higher than any i7 or any i9 ever made.
https://images.anandtech.com/doci/13124/IF%20Power%20EPYC.pn...
Given that scaling, you're looking at 140w between 64 cores which is right at 2w per core. The all-core turbo for TR is 3GHz. If we assume linear scaling on M1 cores, if you dropped them in to replace the x86 cores and the had to reduce from 3.2GHz at 4w down to 2w per core, the all-core turbo would be a mere 1.6GHz AND about a third less cache per core.
TSMC claims 30% less power going from 7nm to 5nm. That means those x86 cores power usage drops from 2w to 1.4w. With the same linear scaling and 4w at 3.2GHz, the M1 design is now operating at 1.1GHz competing with a part that is still 3GHz and the M1 still has only 3mb of cache per core instead of 4.5mb.
Now, I'm betting that actual power usage is 3w which bumps frequency up to 1.5GHz. Still half the frequency, but possibly close enough in performance to Zen 3 at that frequency.
EDIT: It's apparently 3.45w during cinebench according to these benchmarks.
https://twitter.com/panzer/status/1328715510100344833
I'm betting that if they didn't bottleneck on the IO that the M1 would perhaps be faster, but at that scale, interconnects are a much, much larger issue than the cores themselves.
Zen 3 chiplet is 4.15B transistors. The consumer IO die is 2.09B transistors. The Threadripper IO dies is 8.34B transistors. M1 is 16B transistors. A14 is 11.6B transistors. That difference is mostly 2 firestorm cores/cache, 4 GPU cores, another DDR4 controller, and some Thunderbolt/PCIe.
Taking a ruler to a die shot and multiplying that area by transistor density (16B/119mm^2) gives us somewhere around 500M transistors per core plus 3mb of cache. Adjusting out to 4.5MB per core to match Zen 3 adds another 75-100M transistors.
Zen 3 gives 518M transistors per core, but that includes interconnects. Taking a ruler to the core reveals about 14% of the die is interconnect, SMU, and wafer tests (about 580M transistors). Subtracting that from 4.15B and dividing into even core/cache gives 446M transistors per core.
We'll assume an identical IO cost of 8.5B transistors and 150M transistors of interconnect per core. (64 * (600 + 150)) + 8500 is 56.5B transistors and 420mm^2 total area. A zen 3 chip with similar densities would be 310mm^2.
No matter how you slice and dice that, Apple's chip is going to be significantly more expensive than AMD's chip. Thinking anything different is a pipe dream.
EDIT: also note that formal verification adds a lot to chip pricing.
This is just not true. A mini going from idle to a full single-core load is a power increase of 6W. A heavy multicore load hits over 25W.
> A 16 firestorm core Mx will produce roughly the same multicore performance as your TR
With what fantasy math? 30% faster single core performance would be 16 * 1.3 = ~21 equivalent TR cores. It'd be less than half the performance of a 64 core ThreadRipper.
> And a $65 M1 dusts a 4800h that costs over 4x as much and using 1/3 the power
https://images.anandtech.com/graphs/graph16252/119365.png
M1's single-core performance is very strong. But not enough to overcome a ~2x or greater core deficit, either, not at all.
I can't live without 64GB in my desktop and would love to have more, so the new Macs are not for me.
1: https://d3nevzfk7ii3be.cloudfront.net/igi/ZRQGFteQwoIVFbNn (from https://www.ifixit.com/News/46884/m1-macbook-teardowns-somet... )
Hardware companies don't charge cost + some reasonable markup, they charge whatever the market is willing to pay for it. I highly doubt Apple would release some hypothetical "threadripper killer" at a price any lower than they needed to to compete.
Lets assume that all the other parts, high speed RAM, SSD, power supplies, cooling, motherboard, etc cost another $500, and that operations, assembly, marketing etc average 20% and the manufacturer aims for a 5% margin. So they sell their low end Threadripper PC for $3300, and their high end Threadripper for $4,700.
Then Apple comes along and makes it's own high core count versions of the M1 (lets call them the M16 and M24) for $1,000 and $1,500 with similar performance to the Threadrippers. When Apple builds high end Mac Pros out of the, they also spend $500 for other parts, giving total parts cost of $1,500 and $2,000, it marks them up 50% for their typical margins, and sell them for $3,000 and $4,000 and have the same performance as the ThreadRippers from the lowest margin manufacturers at for 10-15% less.
And on top of that, the M16 and M24 use less power and generate quite a bit less heat than the Threadrippers. They don't need any fancy cooling systems. That can lead to smaller packaging and even more cost savings.
Obviously when Apples 16 and 24 Firestorm core Mx chips come out newer Threadrippers will have evolved to smaller process as well, and that will help increase their performance, while reducing cost and heat. But there is little doubt that Apple's Mac Pros will be much more competitive price and performance-wise at that time, and if they keep leveraging TSMC first there is a significant risk that they actually take some of their laptop cost/performance advantage up to Threadripper levels.
Based on the MacBook Air/ Mac mini/ MacBook Pro pricing, I don't think this is the case.
Apple has delivered a significantly faster MacBook Air for the same price as the previous generation. Not only did they increase the CPU speed, they essentially doubled the performance of their the SSD while maintaining their base price.
Apple dropped the price of the base mini by $100 while delivering a significantly faster Mac mini.
I suspect whatever Apple delivers for their top end machines will be equal or lower price to their current Intel machines.
The apple also has twice as many memory channels (8 vs 4) and runs the memory significantly faster (4266 vs 3200).
The m1 also has about half the latency to main memory.
So for highly random workloads that aren't cache friendly I'd expect the M1 to win.
The hardest programs to run will not benefit here.
I don't need chrome to open up 0.1s faster.