Apple to Apple Comparison: M1 Max vs. Intel
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I'm excited to see how this changes x86 systems, mobile and desktop.
Do keep in mind though that the NDK (which takes like 90% of the build time) is still built for x86. So the 4x difference is mighty impressive when you consider that you're comparing an old x86 CPU running its native code to ARM emulating x86, even if doing so via translation.
Similarly, Intel's 1185g7 laptop CPU also goes toe to toe with the 9600k, with comparable performance to the M1 (albeit with worse efficiency). But the efficiency isn't a bother personally as the 1185g7 laptop still lasts all day for my usage. I do have an M1 MBP and have used them side by side, and I'm not really sold yet. Admittedly part of the problem is the locked down hardware and lack of support for Linux - but in the mean time I'm always reaching for the Intel laptop and do not miss the MBP.
It's not entry-level. It's the fastest 6-core part from a product line that included 2, 4, 6 and 8-core desktop parts. Every model in that product line that was better than the 9600k could only be described as high-end.
I think the difference is down to the single core performance edge that the m1 has. In theory multi core benchmarks should dictate the performance you get, but in practice it seems a lot of things, even development tools, depend a lot on single core performance.
I've transitioned to a 16GB M1 MBA too and it's a dream. CPU temps < 60C on dev loads on a hot day (I work outside). 16GB RAM means low swap usage (I used 8GB M1 MBA before this and it was still snappy except on the very limits). Still can drive a 4k monitor or mirrored Sidecar (with BetterDummy) without a peep. Building my work project takes the same time as the i7 16" MBP without the fan noise.
the 16 inch model is the same physical size as the 15-inch models and they removed a lot of bezel. the screen has the same camera/sensor notch as an iphone does, which allows them to extend the screen farther.
full screen videos are letterboxed 99% of the time so the notch blends into. I don't play full screen games so can't tell if thats an issue. and it is in the OS top bar the other rest of the time.
I had googled the size comparison before I purchased the M1 Max model and it helped move the needle for me, but I don't remember the source and we were likely comparing different models
I keep saying, the best Apple advertisement are all other computers (and Windows/Android operating systems). It's like they're not even trying!
I have been really happy with my ThinkPad carbon x1, but I am getting a little envious now.
We hear almost nothing but complaints about them from long-time Mac users who are used to historically quieter devices. Under any load, like a few minutes of Zoom or Teams while connected to an external display, the fans are persistently and disconcertingly audible. It's become almost a meme in video conferences over the past two years when someone unmutes to speak and the fan noise overwhelms the noise suppression that you know they have a Mac.
Display artifacts and connection issues to USB-C displays aren't uncommon on the 2017-2019s either, but it still sounds like a torture test when running two 4k TB3 displays or a single 5k on one. The M1s are the first Macs I've recommend to friends and family in almost a decade.
(I use one for work, it is terrible. And I used to have one for personal use, which I traded for a M1 Air)
My personal Ryzen 5800H powered Lenovo doesn't overheat and I haven't heard the fan I over a month despite doing all kinds of lightweight development and browsing on it.
Meanwhile, my fairly expensive work issued 6 core Intel Xeon Lenovo from 2019 sounds like it's about to take off throughout most of the day.
That G15 was better at some things than my M1 Pro is now but not by enough that I’d want it over the M1 Pro, even considering the price difference.
everything you say about the build quality is definitely true, but I couldn't find anything better that a) had a 3080/3070 and b) was actually in stock.
I think the only time Apple fans actually accepted that an Apple product was actually bad was the trashcan Mac Pro, and that was only because they went half a decade without upgrading it and they replaced a beloved design with one that was branded as a trash can.
I work on an Apple laptop; all of my colleagues work on Apple laptops.
Maybe what you say is true in the spaces you find yourself in, but in all the spaces I chat about these things (Android developer community) none of your claims are true. The general feeling about the last generation of Intel MBPs was initially one of relief that they didn't f** up the keyboard, and then slow dawning disappointment as we realized that the thermal design of the machine was abysmal.
Up until this most recent M1Pro/Max iteration, things were getting so bad that many professionals I know were at least considering a move off of the Mac platform that most of us have been on for a decade or more. Many of us need to compile iOS code occasionally, of course, which means we're kind of stuck.
The M1Max has completely changed all that. One of the senior engineers I know actually put together some benchmarking numbers of compile times, assembled a spreadsheet of every engineer with a pending hardware upgrade, and added up the numbers for a budget ask to buy every single engineer at their company a top of the line 64GB M1Max. The final bill added up to hundreds of thousands of dollars, and just putting it together took a lot of time for this person.
It was approved!
So yeah, there's some real turkey on the bone here. It's not all fanboy hype.
There is a much larger percentage of people for whom the world is not black and white, there is no picking of a ‘team’, and they will use whatever works for them or make do with what they have, moving between brands and models over time.
Please don’t push the ‘Apple fans’ narrative here. There are lots of us who are just trying to get stuff done and have civilised discussion, not engage in polarised mid slinging.
Maybe if you only mean the 2015 models, sure. But models between 2015 and the M1s were trounced by everyone, even Apple fans, for their keyboard issues and throttling the i9.
I had a 2017 i7, and it was the worst Mac I ever owned.
Here is a different sort of data point. I have two Windows programs I need to run on my M1 Pro MB 16. One is an Intel binary and one has been recompiled to ARM. I am running them both under Win11 ARM on a Parallels virtual machine. I am getting better and more responsive performance than I ever did on dedicated Intel hardware. No noticeable fan noise or heat. It is really just a different beast than I have ever used before. Of course, native Mac apps are also much quicker.
Here is another data point from my own machines. 2019 i9 MB Pro Geekbench single core score is 1024. x86 Geekbench single core on M1 MB Pro 16" (x86 emulation) is 1347. Native ARM Geekbench on Win 10 virtual machine running on M1 Pro is 1560. Native single core Geekbench on M1 Pro is 1734. Multi core is 12400.
Look, Intel performance gains over the past decade have been incremental at best. It makes sense to be skeptical that Apple could change the rules like this. I suggest folks just get one of these machines and run their own benchmarks. Apple will give you a full refund, no questions asked for 14 days from the date you receive it. Don't just throw stones, try it yourself.
This comparison maybe Apples to Apples, but it's not really apples to apples. Modern Intel and even older Intel can bring a lot more to the table than the Mac Pro from a few years back could deliver because of Apple's design decisions. You could make the argument that you're just benchmarking Apple Macbooks to choose a platform to run macOS on, but then the datacenter CPU doesn't really add anything.
If you're going to throw a datacenter GPU into the comparison, at least grab a modern Intel chip for your benchmarks. The 9980HK is from two years ago, back when Intel was already losing ground to AMD. The 10th, 11th and 12th gen processors made significant performance improvements since then (12900HK performing twice as well in some benchmarks compared to the 9980HK), at the cost of thermals and power usage.
The M1 will probably still beat a modern Intel chip, but by a significantly smaller margin in terms of performance (battery usage, though, is a whole different story).
Isn’t this the whole point? Sure if you give Intel a bigger thermal envelope it will do better than the M1 but that really is Apples to oranges.
Can’t see it being Apple but feels like an opportunity for someone.
[1]https://semiaccurate.com/2021/12/01/how-is-the-qualcomm-nuvi...
>who decided to try to use those cores in Mobile despite the actual designs not being suited for that. I
Not sure where that idea came from. It was designed with similar wattage in mind as current A15.
> Developing, building, testing, and signing iOS, iPadOS, macOS, WatchOS, and tvOS applications on the Xcode IDE.
I thought it was more for when you don't have a choice (Apple forces you to) than general usage. Are things going to change?
but ..
When Linux boots natively on these systems that restriction will fall away.
My 3950x runs circles around the M1 work has me use. I use both for the same task. Apples to apples.
Same way we started using laptops for all our work. Desktops are always more powerful in absolute terms and cheaper to boot. But most people don’t even buy desktops for home use.
A CPU isn't the only reason there is to use a desktop/fixed setup. While Apple has truly fantastic monitors, there's also the keyboard to consider.
Adding in some gasoline would be apples-to-oranges.
"Everything else about it sucks" certainly seems like it doesn't apply to either.
None of these condemn the device, but do indicate the specific use case wasn't well thought out.
Isn't that at least partly because Intel over promissed and under delivered.
I couldn't get my hands on the 16gb versions at launch, and for the first year they were still so much faster even when swapping 6-10gb but I am feeling the ram crunch a bit these days. I recently upgraded the rest of my team to the new 14 inch pros with 32gb ram and I'll be grabbing one for myself when I have the time next year to do a time machine transfer.
Do you mean CPU?
Plus, $3000 on Macbooks isnt going to exclusively to CPU and RAM either. You buy the whole system. I am not even sure if we can find out the price of the M1 alone. I guess it will be around $500 for the M1 SoC vs $6000 for the Threadripper, still a 12x difference, even if we keep their power consumption out of the equation.
Also, 3995WX is definitely NUMA so their benchmark is skewing the results.
See the source for details: https://github.com/unum-cloud/HashTableBenchmark/blob/00f94c...
I can't tell if these tests make use of multiple threads or not. I don't think they are, because the 128 threads should absolutely crush the 16 threads of the 9980HK.
If it's not, Apple's flagship chips are sorely losing to a chip that's been optimised to bring multicore performance by sacrificing single core performance. It'd be like bringing an F1 car to a dirt track and measuring performance against a rally car, and still losing to the F1. That wouldn't bode well for an M1 Mac Pro at all, unless there's some serious GPU power hidden in there that an AMD GPU wouldn't be able to provide at a similar price.
Huh?
Those choices together with single-threaded memory-intensive benchmarks (esp. those sensitive to memory latency) is problematic because the whole point of using a workstation CPU like the Threadripper Pro is for multi-threaded performance with a wide memory bus (sometimes NUMA). And they make a big deal out of it, emphasising the $50k price tag to paint the M1 Pro/Max as some sort of "Dragon Slayer". If they did a more rounded comparison including stuff like kernel compile times, etc. then maybe they are justified, but as it stands it's just unprofessional.
The fact that the MacBook outperforms the workstation on some benchmarks is an interesting and, for some users, relevant datapoint. To point this out with full and detailed disclosure of the tests performed isn’t unprofessional at all.
This is not how you design "workstation". Macbooks are just toys.
I've only ever seen this happen if you use the lower wattage charger from a 12" Macbook Air with a higher spec'd Macbook Pro.
Last year I had to convert some blu-ray movies so I could stream them to my TV and it was common to go to bed with 100% and wake up at 20% or so. Throttling kicks in when the battery is too low, so I don't think it would shut down, but yeah, this was one of its flaws.
It also overheats and throttles very quickly (~1 minute) even with a more aggressive fan curve or even fans manually set to run at 100%. This can be managed by disabling Intel's Turbo Boost or by using Monterey's power saving mode, but that's not something one expects to do on a "Pro" machine.
In fact, since connecting an external display enables the dGPU, the consumption can increase enough to get you over 96W with the CPU alone
Stupid, but true.
Not sure if it was draining but the battery wasn’t charging either. I closed Cura and it resolved the issue though, I went from 90% battery to 10% in about 2 hours though before plugging the laptop in.
The M1 Max is already a beast of a chip, and lots has been written on HN and elsewhere about how it knocks the socks off the competition. I'm not going to repeat all of the stuff that has already been written all over the internet.
But the most impressive party piece of the new M1s is surely that they can knock the socks off the competition whilst running on battery and can do so for a decently sustained period of time.
All of the remotely viable competition I am aware of needs to be plugged into the mains at all times otherwise you get a very throttled experience.
A big part of the M1 performance per watt efficiency is the SoC integrated design. I'm no motherboard designer but I think it would be nigh on impossible to replicate it using discrete component systems (which I assume is what the Asus is).
Will caveat my comment here with a note that I haven't looked at comparisons for a while, only around the time the M1 was launched.
Apple chips still win, but nowhere near with the same margin as those breathless marketing posts are trying to advertise.
>How a DDR5-powered MacBook.....
LPDDR5, which was correctly labeled later in the article. LPDDR5 is not a variant of DDR5. Hence the title DDR5 powered is inaccurate.
>Cores have massive L2 blocks for a total of 28 MB of L2.
24MB + 4MB. Only 24MB is shared between HP Cores. There is also an additional 48MB of System Level Cache on Max ( 24MB on Pro ). So in reality the cache difference on Mac system is the reason for most ( but not all ) of the performance difference.
>Printing was done via the 5N TSMC lithography standard.
N5.
>Memory bus was upgraded to LPDDR5 and claims up to 400 GB/s of bandwidth.
On Max only. The Pro only has 200GB/s. As the previous headline claimed with both M1 Pro/Max. Agains this is probably nitpicking.
That's already a huge amount for a bloody laptop, probably more relevant is that CPUs are not able to come anywhere near saturating memory bandwidths on the Max: Anandtech tested the memory subsystem[0] and it caps out at around 110 per performance cluster (which you only need 4 cores to reach, with 2 cores already coming close: individual cores reached 102GB/s each), plus around 20 for the efficiency cluster.
[0] https://www.anandtech.com/show/17024/apple-m1-max-performanc...
It's about on-par with modern-ish dedicated laptop GPUs. The mid-range GTX 1060 mobile from 2016 does 200GB/s, a RTX 3070 mobile from this year does ~450GB/s.
The other big game changer is battery life. My top of the line 2019 i9 would chew through battery on Zoom. I could barely get 1.5 hours… which makes the term ‘laptop’ a little silly.
The 2021 can run long enough I don’t pay any attention to the battery, which is the point of a laptop - mobile computing.
General computing is even better, people didn’t even bother bringing their power supplies to work anymore with the M1. They could go all day doing development and the occasional meeting.
Power consumption and MagSafe are the hidden gems of the M1 models imho.
- Encoding: your own camera input.
- Decoding: decoding multiple streams of video.
Your CPU needs to do work on each on these, and depending on what codecs are used (and whether your CPU supports it) hardware acceleration may or may not be supported.
I am just shocked that as big as Zoom is, they don’t have an optimized client for MacBooks. I suppose the market is still far smaller than PC based systems… but come on, Zoom at el have the resources.
I’m surprised WebRTC wouldn’t be hardware accelerated on macOS, especially considering the great lengths Apple has gone to to hide the hardware differences of the various machines behind CoreVideo, VideoToolbox, and AVFoundation.
Edit - For macOS, it may come down to the fact that WebRTC, being a Google project, prefers to use the VP9 codec. It doesn’t look like Apple enables the use of hardware accelerated VP9.
It must be the desire of users and developer laziness that chews all the batteries.
Intel intentionally limits consumer grade hardware in order to create distinct market segments - from overclocking to memory support and PCIe lanes.
If you're doing memory benchmarks, why omit such essential details like memory frequency, as this can have a bigger impact here than the CPU itself?
> 1 TB of eight-channel DDR4 memory
which you apparently need to... bench hashmap lookups?
The mac's pricing seems pretty bullshit as well as the lowest price to get 64GB is $3500 (Max with 24 GPU cores, and a measly 512GB SSD), which does not qualify as "around $3000" in my books.
How about this: I do NOT want a space heater on my desk or under my desk. I have a separate heating system thank you. Looks like the MxBlaBla chips can deliver good performance and stay cool.
Now if Apple would hurry with the MxBlaBla desktops... I don't need a new laptop atm.
The fact that a laptop is even in the same discussion as desktop chips is crazy. The M1 is a seriously impressive piece of hardware.
End of the day all I care about is how fast my chip runs. Different people care about different things, and that’s fine.
I’m generally annoyed by reviews that don’t clearly compare desktop vs laptops parts. This is especially true for GPUs. Just give me all the data and I’ll decide if I care about price or energy use. It’s remarkably difficult to find a comparison between a laptop GPU and a desktop GPU. Which is an important comparison if you’re trying to decide between a laptop or a deskto.
I abuse my machines too. I’m a freelance polyglot so on any given hour of the day I am working on Python, JS, design work, Clojure, Elixir, Ruby, scripting indesign, etc. One of the systems I operate runs millions of domain analysis operations a day and I tend to run a scaled-down version of the real system when developing. I do that for all clients, really.
The MacBook Pro must essentially be viewed as a desktop. The fans are always on full blast. The disk access is slower so Docker container file system sync tends to suffer. It’s not a terrible machine in and of itself, but once I “upgraded” the difference was night and day.
My M1 Mini has 16gb of ram but is otherwise stock. Assuming native ARM execution for a container, Docker is significantly faster at most things. Everything is faster. Running an Intel build of VSCode is the only thing that has ever stressed it, but I’ve never heard the fan. Disk performance is very impressive for such a commodity-grade machine.
We just deployed one in a client site to perform Adobe InDesign imposition “as a service” for an on-demand print factory. It’s handling the work like a champ!
As much as I’d love a new ARM MacBook Pro, the chassis is too big for me. Sounds petty, but the OG MacBook Air chassis is the ultimate mobile computer for me.
So I think I’ll hold off and wait until Apple unveils their Mac Pro replacement. If we extrapolate things out even just a little - it should be a monster.
This is indeed Apple to Apple, but not apples to apples.
I'm totally on board with the narrative that the MacBook Pro has been going downhill for a long time and going to ARM is the ray of hope. At least in the case of my i9 16" they finally fixed the keyboard but it's a ridiculous space heater and it's only about 2x as fast as the 2018 i7 it replaced on a lot of tasks, and that's probably only because I was RAM limited on the 2018 one and am not on the 2021 one. The fan drives me bonkers as it pretty much runs full blast all day while I'm working. Lots of us on our team have seen the battery draining while it's plugged into the wall.
Some of these benchmark games miss the point, the user experience for a "mobile workstation" user has just been going downhill for a long time and these new machines are finally starting to turn that around.
I've had as 13" M1 MBP since launch last year FWIW and have never heard the fan come on, other than the fact it has a Touch Bar it's just about perfect for a personal machine. It feels much faster than the i9 for most real world tasks and the battery life resembles a kindle more than a laptop.
It’s not uncommon on x86 platforms for GPUs, memory controllers, etc to run on 1-2 generation old nodes while the CPU uses the latest tech.
https://news.in-24.com/technology/414335.html
TDP: 35 - 45 watt
but of course, it's better to compare with 3 years old CPU, so the results will be much more impressive.
> A 14-inch MacBook Pro manages around 1750 (single threading) or 12,600 points (multithreading)
Higher in single-threaded only.
https://www.tweaktown.com/news/82364/intel-core-i9-12900hk-m...
On this laptop it achieves > 13000 points in Geekbench Multicore.
My older i9-based Mac was additionally having thermal problems when the AMD graphics chip was used, which added another 20+ watts to the power consumption: use of external screens, video conferencing, ...
The new MacBook Pro happens to vastly improve the power consumption of the CPU, the powerful GPU and the Thunderbolt interface.
- Massive caches
- Really really good power efficiency due to good manufacturing node
- Massive RAM bandwidth
- Very fast I/O performance of the builtin SSD
It's a big, expensive chip to manufacture and it pays off with overall performance.
It's something that showed early on quite a lot when you compared what was considered light usage at that point in time (say open Word and a couple of Safari tabs), a G4 wasn't ridiculous in those scenarios compared to the first Core 2 machines.
While I'm sure the designers paid particular attention to those instructions, it's really x86 being a terrible instruction set than the other way around that create that particular refcounting gap I think.
Vertical integration works, in other words?
The comment gave me the impression that the author may believe M1 has some special instructions for reference counting; it does not.
Getting Intel x64/x86 VMs to work is... fun and they don't perform nearly as well as you'd expect from the gushing praise.
So double check if your virtualization use-case actually is fine with running ARM guests.
But for anyone interested in gaming you either get a console or need another gaming rig.
I know this isn't most or even many gamers, but it's the gaming I did on my intel MacBook and it's way better on M1.
I'm very excited for what future products (M2/M3 - Pro / Max) can do in terms of efficiency and performance.
The 16” seems really too big and heavy for me and I use 3090 for the GPU stuff.
TL;DR: If you're okay with the non-Windows world, there are few reasons (other than GPU performance) to buy new Intel or Chinese processors for consumer apps or professional bit-banging (image/video/audio/machine-learning).
Likewise, there is NO reason to buy Apple SoC processors for mission critical IT (boxes that run backups, your CFO's workstation that still crunches the Board's spreadsheets or other client-side databases including QuickBooks) --those will all need to be on Intel Xeon processors with ECC memory and a battery/UPS until migrated to the Cloud.
More than a year from now, I expect major Chinese manufacturers will release cheaper (RISC V based) UMA designs (which Apple is rumored to be exploring too) and more than two years from now, I expect Intel to release more expensive (Core based) UMA designs (for anyone wanting Windows). I think it is a foregone conclusion Microsoft will get into chip manufacturing (to diversify from Intel and Qualcomm and compete with Amazon and Google) too.