The 5800X is a beast of a CPU. The IPC improvements over the previous generation really are incredible. It's not surprising to me at all that it beats the M1 in several benchmarks. However, it's not the same class of device at all.
The leaked Geekbench results of AMD's upcoming 5800H laptop parts are about 85% of the M1's single core score and matching the M1's multi-core score. TDP is still higher than the M1, obviously, but AMD is also using a 7nm process while Apple got the jump on 5nm by buying exclusivity on TMSC's 5nm process through the end of the year.
I'm extremely impressed with the M1 and I'll be buying an Apple Silicon device as soon as they have something with 32GB or more of RAM. However, the sentiment that the M1 chip obliterates any and every desktop part on the market is getting kind of silly at this point.
That being said, at the same config, the 5800X system would indeed only barely be cheaper.
You will need to wait for the M3 in 2022 for the true desktop HEDT/Threadripper competitor.
1. Nobody ever stated that. If anything, it was all of the Intel and AMD users who created that straw man. "See, it's slower than a 64-core Threadripper at 280 watts". No kidding.
2. The M1 is clearly not a desktop-class SoC nor was it intended to be. However, it's more than competitive with many desktop x86 processors that run faster and hotter while consuming much more power.
3. As a first attempt, the M1’s performance per watt is very impressive. Obviously the 5nm process helps but it's never one thing with Apple: it's the unified memory, the 8 instruction decoders (AMD and Intel max out at 4), and the integration of the 16-core Neural Engine, among other features.
Castrated by a paltry 8GB of RAM in stock configuration!
Probably not.
macOS has had RAM compression since 2009; by now, it's probably implemented in the M1 SoC, so it's really really fast.
8 GB on an M1 is closer to 16 GB on most other processor/operating system combinations.
It's helpful, but it's nowhere near doubling your memory. Especially when you have an SSD to swap inactive data to, the benefit of compression is equivalent to adding something like 0-2GB of RAM.
Oh hell no. If you read through 10K comments sine M1 launch on HN alone, majority of them are stating exactly that. ( Which is rather annoying )
That why you see quite a few of these new benchmarks blog post trying to provide a balanced view.
I have a 15 inch 2018 i9 MBP that's objectively a terrible device (throttling/keyboard).
With corona and WFH I'm weighing my options - right now everything is out of stock but early next year I'd be interested in building a desktop. My problem is the M1 is so good that if they do a 8 performance cores version for 16 inch MBP in spring there would literally be no point in having a desktop - I could have a single device that outperforms the desktop machine. Frankly I don't see why they couldn't offer a 13 inch varian with more cores - thermals are not a constraint.
I'm not sure where people are pulling all these Apple silicon timelines from, but I can guess :)
> please keep in mind that for single-threaded tasks, a single core doesn’t consume all 95W TDP headroom of the CPU. Based on Anandtech’s analysis, a single 5800X core only consumes 17.3W at 4850 MHz
Remember these are single-threaded benchmarks.
Edit: In fact I just ran Cinebench R23 single thread test and package power barely crossed 5W.
https://www.anandtech.com/show/16252/mac-mini-apple-m1-teste...
So do Ryzen CPUs. The 16 core Ryzen only needs 5W per core. It's purely a matter of frequency management.
These comparisons are meaningless because you can say stupid things like "Ryzens are more power efficient than Ryzens" and still be right.
(20W per core is what it reaches on ST tests, with 17W more for the I/O die on desktop Ryzen, an overhead that'll be much lower on Cezanne hopefully)
> While M1 is indeed very powerful for its size, when comparing it to the high-end x86 desktop, it is still slower.
Okay, great. I'm not sure what to expect when you compare the lowest end first generation processor from Apple to one of the more high-end of the spectrum x86.
Edit: Forgot to mention how the power draw on the M1 is still significantly less; m1 with all cores @ 100% is ~20W whereas the x86 ryzen was at 17.3W for 1 one core
> To conclude that it performs better than the existing x86 CPUs, is a mistake.
True, no denying that. Exciting times in this market; I wonder how much better gen 2 of Apple's chips will be if the lowest end can do this.
While obviously neither of us can predict exactly what they’re planning for the rest of the product line, I think it would be naive to assume they haven’t at least internally validated that they can improve performance above these entry level offerings. Otherwise they just axed almost their entire Mac brand, and quite likely the rest would falter before too long.
It's likely that no-one has validated anything when it comes to future tense comparisons.
Read all, believe nothing, especially don't believe the future predictions of someone trying to sell you a laptop today.
Apple has future M1 samples for sure, but they don't have future AMD samples to benchmark against, unless somehow Apple has done some industrial espionage...
In car terms, it's like Tesla trying to persuade someone not to buy a Porsche Taycan. Of course Tesla's going to say their battery lasts longer, even longer than the second generation Taycan no-one has seen that's coming out in a few more years.
Huh? I was just saying the claim (whether it turns out to be true or not) wasn’t about only the M1, and that it’s more reasonable to assume that Apple is confident they can release something above their lowest range offerings.
Because on their marketing page they specifically compare it to laptops and refer to low-power use cases. I have never seen them compare it against HEDT platforms.
Nope—Apple’s marketing never said that. Everything they said in their November 10, 2020 press release has been backed up by reviewers and testers. It's you guys that blew their claims out of proportion.
For example, there's no reason to disbelieve that the M1 13-inch MacBook Pro is up to 3x faster than the best-selling laptops (of the 9 months leading up to November 10, 2020) in it's class—13″ to 14″ laptops that cost around $1200.
Is there a popular PC desktop that cost $600-$699 that's faster than the Mac mini? I've already seen the M1 Mac mini discounted to $625…
From the Apple press release [0]:
And in MacBook Air, M1 is faster than the chips in 98 percent of PC laptops sold in the past year. [1]
And with M1, the 13-inch MacBook Pro is up to 3x faster than the best-selling Windows laptop in its class. [2]
And when compared to the best-selling Windows desktop in its price range, the Mac mini is just one-tenth the size, yet delivers up to 5x faster performance. [3]
[0]: https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2020/11/introducing-the-next-...
[1]: Testing conducted by Apple in October 2020 using preproduction 13-inch MacBook Pro systems with Apple M1 chip and 16GB of RAM. Performance measured using select industry-standard benchmarks. PC configurations from publicly available sales data over the last 12 months. Performance tests are conducted using specific computer systems and reflect the approximate performance of MacBook Pro.
[2]: Testing conducted by Apple in October 2020 using preproduction 13-inch MacBook Pro systems with Apple M1 chip, as well as production Intel Core i7-based PC systems with Intel Iris Plus Graphics and the latest version of Windows 10 available at the time of testing. Best-selling system based on publicly available sales data over the last nine months. Tested with graphics-intensive workloads in commercial applications. Performance tests are conducted using specific computer systems and reflect the approximate performance of MacBook Pro.
[3]: Testing conducted by Apple in October 2020 using preproduction Mac mini systems with Apple M1 chip, as well as production Intel Core i5-based PC systems with Intel UHD Graphics 630 and the latest version of Windows 10 available at the time of testing. Best-selling system based on publicly available sales data over the last nine months. Tested with select industry-standard graphics benchmarks. Performance tests are conducted using specific computer systems and reflect the approximate performance of Mac mini.
"Worlds fastest CPU core"
Of course it's more reasonable to compare it with other low power CPUs in laptops, and not desktop CPUs with 5x the TDP that cost as much as the mac mini before you even buy the rest of the PC, I agree with you on that - I'm just pointing out that people are making these comparisons because Apple themselves did it first.
I'm just pointing out that people are making these comparisons because Apple themselves did it first.
This is slightly disingenuous—I think most people know they meant the design of their cores are faster than any other core, GHz for GHz. They didn't say "the M1 is faster than any other processor out there".
The 5800X runs at 3.7 GHz, peaking at 4.8 GHz with all 8 cores.
The M1 runs at 3.2 GHz and 4 of the cores are low-power cores. Of course the 5800X is faster; this shouldn't be a surprise.
However, as the AnandTech review has pointed out with their benchmarks, if the M1 ran at the same speed as AMD's processors, the M1 would be faster. That's what Apple implied with the "world's fastest core" thing. Even now, the M1 has 8 vs. AMD's 4 instruction decoders, allowing it to process more instructions per clock cycle, with faster RAM.
They have cranked-up M1's in the lab running at faster speeds that they've benchmarked, so they know what they said is true--even if they can't say how they know yet.
The proper way to understand Apple-speak is "even though the M1 is an entry-level chip, it's more than competitive with Intel and AMD's newest chips at a fraction of the power and heat. Wait until we crank up the speed and add more performance cores in future products to see what they can really do."
That's a ridiculous claim. If the AMD cpu ran at 10Gz it would be even faster. Neither does because neither CPU is designed to run at those frequencies.
The M1 is an amazing CPU and it is extremely fast given its power consumption and the frequency it runs at, but a lot of the claims that run around are straight out of Apple Reality Distortion Field.
I thought it was pretty clear they were talking about mobile with the m1.
I think we're seeing posts around desktop CPUs and AMDs upcoming chips because non-Apple people are concerned/annoyed, possible subconsciously, that Apple Silicon is within striking distance of being some of the best hardware out there. I'm not saying that Apple has earned that crown yet, but if they do, and it's only available on Apple machines, it will annoy a lot of power users who want the best.
That's an interesting way of describing Apple's highest performing, late model CPU.
What's actually reached is https://twitter.com/andreif7/status/1328777888213110793?s=21
6.6W CPU power, 9.3W package power (including DRAM)
Look at the chart again. One Ryzen core active, 37 watts total package power. It doesn't matter what the per core wattage is, because you can't get that one core without the package.
This is the desktop Zen 3 which is still using the 12nm I/O die. It uses more power as a result, which nobody really cares about on the desktop. The Ryzen laptops use a single die which is entirely 7nm and thereby less power with no corresponding reduction in performance.
Also, if you want to do an apples-to-apples comparison, the 5800X package handles vastly more I/O.
I mean how could it be. It's AMD to Apple's :-P
The M1 MacPro will give us a sense for how the M* design scales to those sorts of workloads.
This makes less difference than you'd think, because power consumption matters all over. If you use too much power you get high temperatures and have to clock down to avoid overheating.
The core designs for desktops and laptops are basically the same. The desktops use more power because it allows them to hold higher clock speeds -- the base clock of the 4800U (8C, 10W) is 1.8GHz, the base clock of the 3945WX (12C, 280W) is 4.0GHz.
This is also why desktops and laptops have about the same single thread performance. Running a single core at full speed is within the laptop power budget.
So, everybody knows a little laptop CPU and a desktop Ryzen are not the same class but it's still useful to compare.
I have a new laptop with the Ryzen 4800H, I would surely like a direct comparison with the M1.