Even with the "not for everything" guard, this is still some seriously heavy BS.
iMac Pro wasn't used by people who ran Geekbench, but by people who benefitted with bespoke accelerator card, multiple display outputs (which M1 significantly restricted) and support for large amount of memory
Seriously, let's avoid this type of hyperbole and silly comparisons.
I just got my hands on an M1 Mini and it demolishes the iMac on my use case as well.
This is why the iMac Pro is going away, it's simply not needed. The upcoming Apple Silicon iMac should be able to span entry level up to iMac Pro level with just BTO options.
The iMac Pro never supported the afterburner card - that’s a Mac Pro exclusive. I think you’re getting your products mixed up here…
I bought my assistant an M1 macbook air for editing. It is by definition quieter, and yet reliably beat my imac pro in renders!
I would love a machine with ecc ram though. Way fewer random crashes since I got my imac pro.
As for outputs, I’m certainly waiting for more, though the M1 mac mini isn’t terribly if you get one of those new hubs. It has ethernet, two usb c, two usb a and a dedicated power port.
Yeah there’s are people using the imac pro for super crazy advanced things but many people just wanted a fast quiet computer with ports.
(The imac pro is still super quiet for recordings. But the air is fanless)
Not as concerned with video editing and renders. The iMac Pro can wreck the Macbook on specifically OBS software x264 encoding, while OBS is not Apple Silicon-native. Repeat, software encoding, not attempting to use the hardware chip (there can be issues streaming to YouTube using it). This is the one case I've found, of anything, where the iMac Pro wins.
I tried Minecraft, as there's an M1-native version out there. My old intel Mini: 70 fps. The iMac Pro: 240 fps. The M1 Macbook: 270 fps.
I'm gonna say it's rare that my M1 Macbook Pro does NOT beat my Xeon iMac Pro at four times the price, four times the RAM. Again, I literally own both. I've even found a purpose (software x264) where the M1 machine can't keep up. It's the only thing I've found so far, where the M1 isn't faster. Everything else about operating this machine is faster than the iMac Pro, which remains my primary desktop I use every day.
You used it above, and here, in a way I can’t tell if the sentence is different without the word or if I should take some meaning from it.
A better use would be: “I literally have the best intel mac and the m1 air beat it”
In that case it is literal. OP probably just switched it over to a case where highlighting literal ownership is superfluous.
You've nailed it as far as the reason: if you can come up with a task that legitimately needs parallelism that heavy, that's where the Xeon comes into its own. Anything lighter, and the M1 starts to zip ahead.
Not sure if I’m comfortable disclosing numbers, but the iMac Pro is a lot faster for me in that sort of situation.
> The imac pro is still super quiet for recordings. But the air is fanless
I have no issue with the imac pro! Just to say the M1 does win on both counts.
https://barefeats.com/m1-versus-imac-pro.html
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“…bespoke accelerator card…”
Are you thinking of the Mac Pro here? I don’t think the iMac Pro had anything exotic for GPU compute.
My iMac Pro has the Radeon Pro Vega 56 8 GB. I'm given to understand the absolute top of the line had some kind of problems… still, that's as much in graphics card RAM as exists in the whole RAM of some of the M1s. I'm betting Warhammer makes heavy use of the graphics card and it's that which is walloping the M1-running-Rosetta-emulation.
This probably means there will still be games where a previous version with a fancy enough graphics card will get higher framerates than what the M1 Macs can get. I don't anticipate Apple ever making those kinds of concessions to the gamer market, so that's where you're going to see the only holdouts (in terms of, M1 doing super poorly). And that, mostly with stuff that expects real gamer cards. I don't think the Radeon Pro Vega 56 is nearly top of the line for a gamer card but I can easily believe it's better than the on-board graphics for the initial M1 machines. Remember part of the selling point for the iMac Pros is that they could summon up graphics-card grunt for the purposes of 3d modeling.
I should try some Blender experiments and see what's snappier, there's a possibility the iMac Pro will make a decent showing for itself for that reason :)
Yup, my mistake. No idea why I was thinking of the Mac Pro.
However, I mostly agree with you. I think Apple's marketing does a pretty poor job of communicating the difference in their products, and it's certainly intentional. One of my friends ended up buying the iMac Pro for development, and I can't understand for the life of me why. Similarly, he also derides me for not buying a Mac Mini already and ditching my Linux ecosystem for good. C'est va, I suppose.
I can't speak to the all-out performance comparison with a 18 core Xeon, but yeah, this chip is pretty great.