Intel Fires Back at Apple's M1 Processors with Benchmarks | Hacker News Reader

Intel Fires Back at Apple's M1 Processors with Benchmarks

tomshardware.com

58 pointsvbezhenar60 comments

They can benchmark all they want. My M1 macbook pro is silent, even during a facetime or zoom call. The battery lasts more than a day which is incredible, and has never burned my legs while watching a youtube video. Every laptop I've ever owned has been Intel and has never been able to do what this machine can do.

Yeah same, this laptop is super snappy and makes my desktop pc that on paper should run circles around the M1 feel slow. Chrome is the only thing on M1 that still feels 'legacy'. Pixelmator pro is damn near instant which is just nuts.

Hell Intel said it in of the slide: More than performance - It's about choice

Would love to know to whom Intel is presenting this ?

Super excited to see next M1 iterations and what Apple pull of with sw/os updates.

It's also exciting to see a little fire kindled under Intel's ass.

Going from the M1 to any Intel-based system feels like downgrading from an SSD to an HDD. I really don't care what the benchmarks say, the user experience of the M1 feels a generation ahead of whatever the hell Intel is doing. I've yet to see any perceptible drop in the performance of the M1, even when doing the most demanding tasks in my workflow .

Every time I've gone back to one of my Intel-based systems, I've been shocked at how sluggish they feel. I catch myself debating whether these Intel PCs were really this slow two weeks ago, or if the M1 Air just completely upended my expectations of PC performance (hint: it's the latter).

And then there's the fact that no matter what I do, this notebook remains completely cool to the touch. Doesn't matter if I'm using Xcode, VScode, emulators, VMs, this machine always remains cool to the touch. I've yet to see this computer get above room temperature. It's remarkable. Meanwhile I cannot depend on my two generation old Intel MacBook Pro to stream a simple YouTube video without the fans revving up.

And the battery life is so good that I actually get disappointed when it lasts "only" 12 hours on a charge.

Then there's the little niceties. Such as how my windows instantly rearrange when docking my M1 Air to an external USB-C display. Or how animations are consistently 60 fps no matter what I'm doing. Or how the system instantly wakes from sleep.

The M1 MacBook Air is without doubt the best computer I have ever used. I never thought using a computer could ever be so pleasant. This thing feels magical.

Yeah I really don't understand why a zoom/skype video call absolutely MURDERS the battery on my laptop.

It's basically just video playback. How is it so hard on the CPU?

It's also video encoding/compression for your outbound stream. If you're sharing your video on the call, that is.

But wait... I never do. I join Webex calls all the time without enabling my camera, and it still eats 30% of anything available (memory, CPU, my patience, etc.)

So, I guess I'm not sure?

Audio/video encoding is not cheap and it's questionable whether your device and software support hardware encoding. Decode is expensive too, but has better hardware support (which gives you the illusion that "just" video playback is somehow easy).

It's really one of the most expensive cpu bound tasks in contemporary computing. It's not too different from evaluating CNNs.

Software support for the hardware encoding/deciding is very not good. Webcam streams mpeg to electron, electron probably decodes in software, reencodes in sofware, then decodes incoming stream(s) in software. If there's any client side encryption or filtering, that probably also happens in software. It's probably all JS software too. It's like the worst possible case for how to architect an app for performance. At least it's JITed these days.

Zoom doesn’t use Electron, and AFAIK it’s all native code.

In this instance the Electron VM/etc matters a lot less than the “(re|en)codes in software” part.

Zoom is QT, not electron. Also browser engines have good support for hardware decode, it's really in OSS libs and on platforms like Linux where there is little to no support.

They may have good hardware decode for web content, but whatever the circumstances, it's not kicking in for video conference. Maybe the use of low-latency codecs, multiple streams to decode, or other effects/compositing/analysis happening?

I believe it's about compression and bandwidth.

There might be background removal and audio processing too.

Believe it or not, the activity that drains the battery the fastest on my M1 MacBook Air is video calling. I can expect maybe 8 or 9 hours of battery life if I'm Facetiming all day. With all other workflows (developer workflows, of course), I consistently achieve at least 12 hours of battery (15+ hours is possible on the high end).

Ditto!

Agreed; my M1 macbook air is the best and fastest computer I have ever owned and it isn't even close. Instantly being on from sleep has made my work intel macbook pro feel old. Teams meetings turn the intel fan into a jet engine. My M1 macbook joins zoom meetings in utter silence for many, many hours without plugging in. I have yet to see a stutter or dropped frame in the M1 UI. My work intel mac pauses when swiping between workspaces on a regular basis.

Intel should be panicking; the M1 is incredible.

Isn’t a misleading benchmark the sort of thing you publish when you’re panicking?

That was what I meant to imply, but it wasn't very clear. Intel is grasping at whatever straws it can think of since they have lost the fab advantage and their power usage is out of control.

I wonder how much of this is because of the OS?

Apple has the opportunity to tune macOS to their hardware like nobody else and now they can also tune their hardware to macOS.

M1 is the result of that.

But the M1 also has another advantage over the Intel chips that preceded it in Macs - it's actually a beast of a CPU, with a huge reorder buffer and lots of execution ports to drain it.

It’s the silence during Google meet calls that’s my favourite thing - my god my air was about to take flight every single time. I can’t believe how unoptimised that was. New M1 air offers enough performance for me for the next 10 years

This is the weirdest thing to me. I use a surface book and I've never had the fans turn on during video calls, even full-screen with lots of people on external 4k monitor.

Everyone switching to the new M1 talks about how quiet they are and I've not had a computer make noise unless I'm playing a serious 3d games. Why were the last gen macs so noisy?

Yes, Intel MBP running Teams with loud fans is embarrassing.

Intel Macbooks have terrible thermal management. People generally compare Intel Macbooks with M1 Macbooks.

It has to do with macOS and Intel vs Microsoft and Windows.

I think Apple sort of give up optimising x86 on Intel a while ago.

I have an 8 core mac pro, 64 gb of ram. I bought a 16 gb ram M1 macbook air for my assistant so she could edit videos for me.

We did a render test using an app compiled for apple silicon. The fanless MacBook air beat the imac pro by a solid 15 percent or so.

I was expecting a result like that but it’s still stunning to see. We did the render test in camtasia, which is what I had used to make a screen recording.

"Gaming was a mix, with Intel and Apple trading blows with integrated graphics. But Intel also got a little snarky, placing Apple at 0 frames per second for a number of games that don't currently work on macOS and the M1 CPU."

That's actually pretty funny.

Yeah, that’s a pretty good troll on their part.

Maybe we can also compare Visual studio and Xcode on compiling XNU and mark VS as infinite time, since VS cannot compile XNU?

I’m a lifelong Intel customer, Intel shareholder, recent seller of an Intel Macbook Pro 15” and current owner of a Ryzen 3700-based tower and two M1 Macs and I find these slides to be comically misleading cherry-picked bullcrap of the first order. Just fyi.

Sadly this is intel clutching at whatever it can to prove it's relevant.

The real engineering feat of the M1 processor was how quickly it came to market and its performance per watt for real world usage of common web tasks and anything within the Apple ecosystem.

As nice as battery life benchmarks are, I know that the Intel CPU will ramp up and chew through it's maximum rated wattage while keeping under it's thermal limit. An Apple SOC on the other hand will hum along nicely.

> The real engineering feat of the M1 processor was how quickly it came to market...

Apple has been designing its own processors for 11 years and bought a team to do so that had been doing so for much longer than that. Also, nobody outside Apple knows how long they were working on M1 specifically.

It’s still pretty impressive that they pulled off a basically seamless architecture transition. M1 + Rosetta 2 just works so well it’s hard to even tell the difference much of the time.

I mean, they have done that twice before. They've clearly learned a few things.

Yeah in the mobile space - the whole x86 translation layer they implemented with custom hardware though would have blown the tops off the best engineers at Microsoft who work on their ARM Surface products.

I'm pretty interested to see what's in store for Apple during this transition

,,In battery life, Intel switched to an Intel Core i7-1165G7 notebook, the Acer Swift 5, rather than sticking with the Core i7-1185G7 in the whitebook it used for performance testing''

Wny not just test the Intel laptop in sleep mode? That way it has a chance to compete with a running MacBook.

> Intel claims that the M1 in the MacBook Pro it tested failed eight out of 25 tests it uses, including "Switch to Calendar'' in Outlook, "start video conference" in Zoom, and "Select picture Menu" in PowerPoint.

Honestly, what's the point of these office related benchmarks other than marketing nonsense? When has these tasks ever matter performance wise?

That part just sounds like Intel is admitting that their test suite is broken. I'm not sure why they'd mention that in their marketing pitch.

This comical bullshit reminds me of the intentionally-hilarious stuff in Nigerian spam emails, which is designed to be so obviously bogus that it filters out all but the stupidest and most credulous targets.

Wow. Intel's slides /reek/ of desperation.

Intel can't beat Apple on performance per watt (other than price, that is the only metric that really matters), so they claim their competitive advantage is that there are more Steam games on Windows?

Preserving hardware backward compatibility is a valid selling point. And a costly one to maintain. Apple has leveraged software and tooling instead.

Why don't they fire back with new processors that don't sht themselves?

Just a reminder: There was a time AMD was a butt of all jokes about their paper products and stupid bordering on insulting marketing. Then Intel came along and hired top AMD PR people away.

https://www.techspot.com/news/79579-intel-hires-marketing-ex...

https://www.eteknix.com/former-amd-marketing-director-chris-...

They also hired Raja Koduri to launch a mobile GPU in a desktop form factor ...

It feels like it's been a long time since Intel gave a shit, especially on mobile. Look at their latest mobile cpus and they don't get any more performance per dollar than give year old processors. There's been absolutely zero excitement factor from Intel in, jeez, five or six years? When's the last time you saw a link to new Intel benchmarks and thought "oh hell yeah"?

Its sad, because I used to be hungry for it. I remember reading page after page about Sandy Bridge. I remember being wowed by Bay Trail with its cool, silent operation and its thirty dollar msrp.

This was more of Windows over Mac rather than Intel Vs M1. All the slides about gaming, creation, plugging in XBOX controller ? Looking at the slides - Intel is desperate.

The most interesting thing to me about this is that this is not about Intel competing with Apple. Apple has no interest in selling its chips.

Your is Intel trying to name sure other PC manufacturers don’t jump ship to other architectures and chip makers. Intel doesn’t really care that Apple’s gone, but they do care that everyone else might leave too.

Isn't Apple's claim about the M1 best performance per watt not best performance overall?

I don't believe so. All materials I saw were for best compared to products in the same market segment.

Without stating what would be considered the market segment. I think that was to dissuade conversations comparing a MacBook Air against a Ryzen desktop and keep the focus on ultra portables where Intel currently rules but their products are completely shit.

Not a good look. It's like trash talking opponent after they beat the shit out of you. Is there anyone at Intel who can actually make computer chips rather than slides and talking points?

This is the page I like:

https://www.cpubenchmark.net/high_end_cpus.html

Hmm... The intel chip doesn't look so bad:

https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Core+i7-1185G...

I wonder where m1 would fall in the mix

It would be on the top of this list: https://www.cpubenchmark.net/singleThread.html

"For pure productivity performance, Intel’s testing eschews typical benchmarks. Sure, it used Principled Technologies' WebXPRT 3, but the Microsoft Office 365 tests appear to be based on Intel's internal RUG (real-world usage guideline) tests" (see linked Article)

"Principled Technologies"

Oh really! Only this time it's not directed at AMD but at Apple's M1!

Apple has the advantage of a 5nm Taiwan process node while Intel is making 10nm chips in Oregon and Arizona. And AMD Ryzen has the advantage of Taiwanese 7nm. Apple is hogging most 5nm capacity to itself because it can use its 800lb Gorilla volume to squeeze out competitors. ("All your 5nm belongs to us or we'll do you like we did nVidia. We've shipped over 1.65 billion devices and no one can afford to say no to us. Like the British Empire of old and the Dutch East India Company we can use the modern equivalent of gunboat diplomacy to force you Asians to do business on terms most favorable to us." [The USA just sent the USS Roosevelt carrier group to the South China sea as I write this, so the old-fashioned gunboat diplomacy never went out of fashion, either.]) Anyhow, it's impressive that Intel can even be in the same ballpark using much larger and much more power hungry 10nm gates made in the good ol' USA. When Intel, AMD, and Apple are all eventually on the same final process node (3nm or 1nm or whatever) I'll be curious to see how Intel then compares. Intel stock P/E is currently a very low 11.78 while Apple is 37.09 and AMD is 42.59.

Interesting point on the P/E considering eventual convergence on a final process node.... intel looks like a low-risk value play for the long run

> Anyhow, it's impressive that Intel can even be in the same ballpark using much larger and much more power hungry 10nm gates made in the good ol' USA

Depending on how you choose to read this, this could also be a very strong signal that Apple still has plenty of room for optimization when node size bottoms out. Has Intel already used much of that optimization headroom? Will those optimizations necessarily transfer from 10nm to 7 and 5 and below?

Intel is desperate.

Good. Let them work their way back.

Too little, too late, too cherrypicked. Byee Intel.

What's the point of this? M1 has conquered the laptop market (at least the "thin & light" end, gaming is another matter). I'm expecting to see Chromebooks and other ARM devices go wild in 2021.

Intel should ignore M1, it's irrelevant to Intel's business model (making desktop and server CPUs, and mobile CPUs for heavy desktop users who want the same programs on the go).

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