But the fact that you're even mentioning your desktop in the same breath is kind of the whole reason it is amazing. Like that's the rhetoric--holy shit your laptop is doing this.
Apple hasn't even released the Pro desktop stuff yet.
Apple hasn't even released the Pro desktop stuff yet.
The problem with this take is this:
https://www.anandtech.com/bench/product/2685?vs=2613
This is mobile vs. desktop Zen 2 with the same number of cores. You give a CPU three times the power budget and it gets marginally faster. Because the last few hundred MHz of clock speed uses a ton of power, and that's it.
But then you have this:
https://www.anandtech.com/bench/product/2613?vs=2666
Nearly double the multi-threaded performance at the same TDP, because it has twice as many cores and it only has to give back the last few hundred MHz of base clock to do it.
A laptop with performance largely equivalent to <= 8-core desktops wasn't a novelty. What a desktop really gets you is the ability to have a lot more cores.
So sure, you can cherry pick one part of the SoC, match it up against one aspect of Chip X and try to make a point. OK, you win that one. I'm talking about what the SoC as a whole does while running near-silently off a battery.
Yes, a desktop gives you the ability to have more CPU cores. I'm sure that's what we'll get from whatever Apple decides to ship for its true Pro desktops.
People were primarily comparing it to desktop CPUs because of where we were in the release cycle. How does it compare to Zen 3? Well, Zen 3 laptops were still a few months away when the M1 was released, but Zen 2 desktops were only a single digit percentage faster than Zen 2 laptops, so how does it compare to Zen 3 desktops?
Meanwhile the primary real advantage of the M1 is that it uses less power. Compared to PC laptops, it's a somewhat less power. There are already PC laptops with 9+ hours of battery life (and no matter how little the CPU uses, you still have to run the screen and everything else), so the practical impact of this isn't enormous, but it's there. But if you compare the power consumption to PC desktops, OMFG! Except that nobody really cares about the power consumption of PC desktops. That's why they triple the power consumption to eek out 8% more performance.
A lot of this is also attributable to how good Apple's marketing is. I don't know if they did this on purpose, but people keep publishing SPEC benchmarks for comparison with PCs. Part of this is that a lot of the ordinary benchmark software either doesn't run on Mac at all or there was no native ARM version available yet. But SPEC was put together by a consortium of server vendors. Their incentive is show that their POWER and Xeon processors are worth the fat premium over regular desktop CPUs. So the suite skews heavy to benchmarks limited by memory bandwidth, because big servers will have like 16 times more memory channels than a desktop.
Then Apple shows up with this SoC that has a ton of memory bandwidth because it's necessary to feed the GPU and it stomps all over those specific benchmarks. Then it's OMFG again even though those results aren't actually typical because most workloads aren't limited by memory bandwidth.
It's not a bad chip. The level of hype is just extraordinary.
> There are already PC laptops with 9+ hours of battery life
Not when they're actually doing anything. To compete with what the M series chips bring, you need a discrete GPU and a very hungry CPU. Such a machine does not get 9+ hours of battery life.
> The point is that we already had this. Both the CPU and GPU are competitive with existing CPUs and GPUs. Which is a first in a long time for anybody outside of AMD/Intel/Nvidia. But "competitive" and "dramatically better" are not the same thing.
Right, you already had something like this in multiple discrete components that consume a huge amount of battery life when cobbled together into one system. My entire point has been that the impressiveness of the M series chips comes from their efficiency and what they are able to do holistically in a single SoC.
> A lot of this is also attributable to how good Apple's marketing is
Sigh. Alright I know what I'm dealing with now. Good day to you sir!
Then you get results that are equivalent rather than superior.
> Not when they're actually doing anything.
Yes, when they're actually doing anything. The M1 Macbooks get around 16 hours. Under the same kind of load a similarly performing PC laptop might get around 10 hours. Other PC laptops will get 16 hours (or more) by having a lower TDP and then being slower, especially on multi-threaded workloads.
This obviously only matters to people who care about not just long, but very long battery life, and very high performance, and aren't willing to make the weight trade off of getting one with a bigger battery.
> My entire point has been that the impressiveness of the M series chips comes from their efficiency and what they are able to do holistically in a single SoC.
It has very little to do with being in a single SoC. The CPU being able to use the memory bandwidth which is there for the GPU is a neat parlor trick but it only matters if memory bandwidth is the bottleneck, which it usually isn't.
> Sigh. Alright I know what I'm dealing with now.
You don't think that Apple has excellent marketing? They've done this for decades. They make a competitive product and then convince their customers that alternatives are dramatically inferior by pointing to narrow edge cases.
The part where the efficiency is radically better than competing parts has everything to do with it being an integrated SoC.
> Then you get results that are equivalent rather than superior.
Equivalent to what? Your desktop at 5+ times the wattage? A Windows laptop with half the battery life and twice the weight?
> Yes, when they're actually doing anything. The M1 Macbooks get around 16 hours. Under the same kind of load a similarly performing PC laptop might get around 10 hours. Other PC laptops will get 16 hours (or more) by having a lower TDP and then being slower, especially on multi-threaded workloads.
Ok this is so ambiguous as to be nearly meaningless. 10 hours of what? At the least you're conceding that in this undefined workload the MacBook gets 6 more hours, which again, has been my whole point. The holistic efficiency is the whole story.
> This obviously only matters to people who care about not just long, but very long battery life, and very high performance, and aren't willing to make the weight trade off of getting one with a bigger battery.
"Only people who want better performance and better battery life should get an Apple Laptop" ... is that basically what you're saying here? Because we might just finally be in agreement.
If you don't care about performance or battery life or weight there are plenty of Windows options available. This is true.
What makes you think that? The CPU is about the same speed as other CPUs, the GPU is about the same speed as other GPUs, and it uses less power in no small part because it's the first thing to use TSMC 5nm.
Being an SoC allows you to save a certain amount of overlap, e.g. you don't need separate memory controllers for the CPU and GPU, but none of that stuff uses a significant amount of power.
> If you don't care about performance or battery life or weight there are plenty of Windows options available.
It's not matter of not caring. You can get PC laptops with similar performance and similar weight and 10 hours of battery life instead of 16. Ten hours is not exactly oppressive. If you really, really need sixteen, you can trade it against weight or performance at your option -- it's not necessary to do both.
Or you could wait a few months for PC laptops on TSMC 5nm which will have better power efficiency.
It absolutely uses more power to have things on separate dies. Why do you think monolithic designs like this are preferred for mobile first products? It's certainly not because it's cheaper or easier. SoCs like this typically have lower yields and higher costs--you do it because in return you can squeeze out better power and efficiency while also saving space on the board.
> It's not matter of not caring. You can get PC laptops with similar performance and similar weight and 10 hours of battery life instead of 16.
This is just so emphatically not true though. Like I'm going to need to see the workload you're referencing where a device with similar benchmarks across the board (CPU and GPU) gets 10 hours of real world battery life without weighing 5 lbs.
Like I have in my possession as a daily driver a 2020 MacBook Pro that uses an Intel IceLake chip--fairly recent tech! If I'm doing my actual work on it--a bit of Docker, Chrome, and an IDE--I'm lucky to make it much past lunch. A fairly recent Intel chip, that gets positively embarrassed performance-wise by an M1, and can barely turn in 6 hours of real usage.
I want to see this system you have that performs like an M1 and turns in 10 hours of real world battery usage.
> Or you could wait a few months for PC laptops on TSMC 5nm which will have better power efficiency.
You could have already had it for well over a year now with Apple. And by the time this mythical laptop you're speaking of arrives, Apple might have already moved on to the next node. But hey, it's your life not mine. Keep waiting if it pleases you.
I wonder if future perf gains will come, game console-style, from areas besides general purpose computation -- specialized instructions / cores for specialized tasks.
Imagine an entire core optimized for Safari and its Javascript engine. Their next chip is called the "M1 Marathon Edition" and you get 36 hours of real-world battery life with Safari. And/or the iWork suite. And maybe they have a behind the scenes collab with Slack and select other app makers so that they can be a part of the "Marathon" program too.
I dunno, just spitballing. Not saying that's likely or even what I'm pining for, just one possible avenue once they've plucked all the low-hanging general purpose computing fruit.
What if somebody on the Intel/AMD side of things includes some optimizations for SSE, AVX, etc? Are they punishing everybody else?
At any rate, my idea was less than half baked and again, not exactly something I'm pining for. Was just thinking about things Apple might conceivably be able to try with their unique vertical integration.
Hyper-optimizing for a particular application means the way that particular application works gets accelerated, but not things in general. Sure, if a browser behaved identically to Safari, it too would potentially experience the speed up barring any weird microcode/firmware that only allows those extensions to be used by Apple-signed binaries which is a whole 'nother level of nightmare. Stepping outside of that highly optimized path is essentially a penalty though as it by definition wouldn't be so highly optimized. And once that optimized path has been etched into the silicon, there's no real updating it unless we move to CPUs being more like FPGAs which isn't likely to happen.
Intel doesn't forbid compilers from generating code for SSE or AVX.
Apple _does_ forbid Chrome from using energy management and other APIs for no other reason than to keep it less efficient than Safari.
That is unfair and I would not support that behavior whether talking about private software APIs or private hardware instructions. What I was half-assedly imagining wouldn't be anything like that.
(Although, FWIW, Chrome has private APIs too: https://blog.chromium.org/2021/01/limiting-private-api-avail... Different use case, but still.)
I've been having trouble figuring out exactly which private bits and bobs Webkit might be taking advantage of on MacOS.
Other commenters are suggesting that Apple's intent is to keep Chrome and other third-party apps from matching Safari's energy efficiency.
But as you say, I'm not sure that makes strategic sense. If that is true, Apple is essentially crippling most Mac use cases just to benefit Safari. That really would not seem to be in Apple's best interests.
I am a developer, but not a iOS/MacOS developer. So I have followed this sort of thing only very loosely over the years.
But whenever I have heard about grumblings about private Apple-only APIs being used by blessed first-party Apple apps on iOS, it seems to me that the explanation was always that the private APIs either:
1. posed some sort of security issue
2. were simply not yet stable enough to expose to third-party apps
As every developer knows, publicly exposing any API represents a maintenance burden: you're committing to support that API and keep it stable for X number of years. In general you see this kind of pattern a lot: a platform developer dogfoods APIs internally for some period of time before they're stable enough to expose publicly.
E.g even on the M1 Pro/Max, you're going to get much better performance and battery if you're using a video editor that supports prores decoding.
It's already possible to target GPUs in-browser directly; and most older HTML primitives were recast in terms of GPU operations around the time of the original iPhone. The only thing I can think of that's still been left on the table is rendering vector geometry on-GPU; but most sites don't redraw so much as to make this a huge performance win.
Video decode has been offloaded to hardware for decades as well. The only reason to decode video on-CPU is if you're decoding crazy-old formats[0] that don't have hardware decoder blocks present for them.
The other huge problem is networking - which is also heavily hardware-optimized and has been for a while. Large assets mean keeping your Wi-Fi or LTE baseband on for longer. You could mitigate this with compression; which can be hardware optimized... though I'm not sure how much of a benefit that provides outside of game consoles[1].
[0] In my personal experience: I wrote a Sorenson H.263 decoder for Ruffle. Right now it not only executes on-CPU, but blocks the event loop main thread. However, the video files in question are so low-quality that this isn't a significant problem for most Flash movies and everything works fine (though I do want to try on-GPU video decoding at some point).
[1] Current-gen game consoles (PS5/XSeries) have hardware decompression blocks. However, the intent is to quickly decompress gigabytes worth of data quickly; most websites aren't nearly that bloated.
I'm not. Let them all scramble and pull out the big guns to try to compete. That's capitalism at it's finest, which isn't exactly what we've been seeing in the CPU space for the prior decades. We got lucky that AMD caught Intel with their pants down recently (if only because it strengthens AMD and makes them a better competitor), but a duopoly isn't necessarily what I would consider a good market condition for progress (as we've seen with iOS vs Android). Lots of different experiments with feedback from people on what they find good would be much preferable, and while a constrained CPU such as Apple's isn't perfect, it does represent more choice and pressure on other players to evolve in ways they may have been resistant to previously.
> And maybe they have a behind the scenes collab with Slack and select other app makers so that they can be a part of the "Marathon" program too.
RIP the general purpose computer. :(
> And maybe they have a behind the scenes collab with
> Slack and select other app makers so that they can
> be a part of the "Marathon" program too.
RIP the general purpose computer. :(
Since heterogenuous cores are now a mainstream thing, with a mixture of full-throttle and performance-minded cores on a single die, and the performance cores may be hitting a wall until we get to smaller processes, perhaps the next frontier could be efficiency.
Remember how some software proudly displayed those "optimized for MMX" or "optimized for 3DNow!" badges back in the day? What if there was something like that for apps that optimized for those efficiency cores, and what if the efficiency cores met them halfway by implementing some app-friendly stuff in hardware? Sort of like how some common Javascript string ops have dedicated CPU hardware dedicated to them now.
Anyway, yeah. I'm probably just re-inventing CISC all over again, badly.
I don't think that would be worth it. What's the point of 36 hours of battery life? How often do you need more than 12 hours of life on battery? Increasing the maximum battery life only makes sense when it also increases battery life for the more power-hungry workload (which is where you're likely to reach the limit), why bother building dedicated hardware for a specific workload that's already beyond what you need?
> reducing electricity usage reduces costs and overall emissions in to the planet
You're going to need a looooooooooooooooong time for the electricity usage reduction to compensate for the enormous energy cost of manufacturing a new laptop. If you care about the climate, don't buy a new laptop if your previous one is still running fine, there's just no way energy efficiency is going to be worth it.
Considering that some of the magic in these things is the shared, local memory with a very wide bus it would seem obvious that trying to go multi chip would indeed be a massive headache in this regard
[0]: https://architosh.com/2021/10/apples-new-m1-pro-is-chop-vers...
All of the M1 devices have been monolithic dies so far.
This fact however makes "performance per watt" comparisons misleading between different processors designed for different environments (e.g. M1 vs AMD Desktop). It takes a more power to get that much extra perf, conversely and the more under-appreciate part IMO reducing the speed a little can save a ton of power/heat if the chip is currently running at the higher power portion of the curve.
On a desktop machine most people would want them to tune for performance at quite a substantial power efficiency cost so of course a desktop chip most probably is less power efficient per unit of compute. You don't need to power it with a battery after all and there's heaps more cooling capacity in a bigger form factor so why optimise for that?
For comparison, the 3090 has almost 1TB of memory bandwidth.
Per chiplet.
Zen 2 was a must-have upgrade over Zen+ and it was a 10% IPC increase.
To be clear - Apples M1 hardware is good, even great. It's just that Apples marketing hype is so over the top, and so many people buy into it so hard that people (such as me) still feel the need to bring it down to earth.
Except it's not. The performance per watt is significantly better on average. Only one of the examples in this post really talked about power usage and that example also says that the 3090 is using a special compiler and gets to use the special tensor cores in the 3090, but for the M1 Max it wasn't able to use the neural cores or the special compiler and still achieves a similar performance per watt.
If you look at more detailed benchmarks from Anandtech:
> In the SPECfp suite, the M1 Max is in its own category of silicon with no comparison in the market. It completely demolishes any laptop contender, showcasing 2.2x performance of the second-best laptop chip. The M1 Max even manages to outperform the 16-core 5950X – a chip whose package power is at 142W, with rest of system even quite above that. It’s an absolutely absurd comparison and a situation we haven’t seen the likes of.
https://www.anandtech.com/show/17024/apple-m1-max-performanc...
But it's kind of a strained comparison. Power usage doesn't scale linearly with performance for any CPU (power consumption scales with the square of voltage) so squeezing the last 20% of performance out of a desktop chip could require doubling the power consumption. Which is actually find for a desktop because I really don't care if my CPU consumes 100-200W for a few minutes while doing a compile. But trying to compare performance-per-watt between two parts tuned for different parts of the power/efficiency curve is always going to be misleading.
If we wanted to compare straight across, comparing to AMD's mobile Ryzen parts would make more sense.
AMD has a 35W mobile part that isn't all that far behind the M1 parts: https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/11001445
Even using Geekbench as the benchmark, we see that the M1 Pro multicore score is around 12650, which is 58% better than the Ryzen 9 5980HS you linked.
1. https://www.anandtech.com/show/17024/apple-m1-max-performanc...
In other news, processor that draws more power on a more efficient process is faster. More news at seven.
I assume SPECfp specifically scales really well with memory bandwidth/latency.
Regardless, I was talking about GPU performance in my comment (because GP was talking about GPU performance) which all of the replies seem to be ignoring.
The one advantage of the M1 Max's GPU is more memory.
The third party testing does show that the comparison is valid.
>The chips here aren’t only able to outclass any competitor laptop design, but also competes against the best desktop systems out there, you’d have to bring out server-class hardware to get ahead of the M1 Max – it’s just generally absurd.
https://www.anandtech.com/show/17024/apple-m1-max-performanc...
That doesn't diminish how excellent Apple Silicon is for Macbook users (and Mac Mini users).
It's just an exciting time when laptops (with the right silicon) can do more than ever before, reducing the need to have a desktop for a lot of tasks, and also... largely not a great time to be using Intel chips. (Alder Lake is very high performing, but power hungry and desktop only.)
Right, and I acknowledged the battery life as amazing.
But currently, I can't buy an M1 Max desktop if I wanted to. So instead I have a 16" MacBook Pro semi-permanently attached to my monitor and keyboard at my desk. It's basically a desktop for me.
I don't expect a laptop to outperform my AMD/nVidia desktop workstation. And sure enough, it doesn't! But it comes surprisingly close for common tasks and I'm very happy to have it.
It used to be different, but now frequency is so close to the absolute limits that adding more power doesn't help single core performance that much.