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> At the cost of thermals and power usage

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.

Horse is a lot faster than a motorcycle if all you've got for fuel is oats, hay, and water.

Adding in some gasoline would be apples-to-oranges.

More like a Tesla vs a gas guzzling rocket car. Rocket car may be technically faster under optimal conditions - but everything else about it sucks.

It's not clear to this reader which of Intel or Apple you mean for each of your examples.

"Everything else about it sucks" certainly seems like it doesn't apply to either.

I’d guess it’s obvious to others (and probably you) given one in the example is a lot more efficient, but for clarity the M1 Max was the Tesla.

Your analogy made perfect sense to me - I’m still trying to understand the whole horses and motorcycles thing!

Something that does not perform well when operated in an environment it is ill-suited to: trying to run a motorcycle on oats. Or an Intel processor on a laptop that sacrificed adequate cooling for aesthetics. Or a Tesla in a place without many electric charging stations.

None of these condemn the device, but do indicate the specific use case wasn't well thought out.

It’s down to brute force raw power and performance per watt nowadays. Apple mostly wins the latter but the former is inevitably going to kill demand for those climate unfriendly servers due to cooling and powering problems. We await the high end Mac systems with much interest.

Since those high-end Mac systems won't be able to run in datacenters, what's the point there? You're pretty much at the mercy of whatever Intel, AMD and other ARM manufacturers release.

> Mac systems won’t be able to run in datacenters

https://aws.amazon.com/pm/ec2-mac/

These are seemingly MacOS only which doesn’t really qualify for the vast majority of data center uses. They’re here to build software for Apple devices and that’s pretty much it.

From that link, the use cases are:

> 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?

IIRC the MacOS EULA forbids anything else

but ..

When Linux boots natively on these systems that restriction will fall away.

Well not sure about your data center comment. But it has gotten those making purchasing decisions asking about ARM based and their alternatives. Apple doing ARM lends legitimacy to other ARM vendors where previously the topic could lead to ridicule.

Apple should license the M1 core architecture to someone to make server chips with it. They'd make some extra money and lose nothing... in fact they might gain since it would build market share around the architecture.

So obvious, and yet apple is worth $3tr...

If the massive bandwidth shared CPU / GPU memory approach is optimum on the desktop for many workloads then one would think that there would be a sizeable market for that in the cloud - after all many desktop workloads (video editing) for example are moving to the cloud.

Can’t see it being Apple but feels like an opportunity for someone.

Because Apple wasn't interested in doing that some engineers left to found their own company doing Apple style cores for serves. It was called Nuvia. It was eventually bought by Qualcomm who decided to try to use those cores in Mobile despite the actual designs not being suited for that. I feel like I shouldn't just spill Charlie's scoop on exactly why[1] but it doesn't look good.

[1]https://semiaccurate.com/2021/12/01/how-is-the-qualcomm-nuvi...

My suggestion it to watch the investor day meeting along with Ananadtech reporting on the issue. As usual not sure what Charlies is on about.

>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.

Depends if you feel the thermal constraints are inherent to the form factor, or simply sloppy engineering.

If your machine is perpetually sitting on your desk then that doesn't really matter. For personal use, power and thermals are only a serious concern away from your desk.

My 3950x runs circles around the M1 work has me use. I use both for the same task. Apples to apples.

But it’s one of those things where you might change your behaviour or priorities if something becomes possible. In this case, having all day battery life on a laptop while also having maximum performance.

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.

> priorities if something becomes possible.

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.

>Apple has been known for their lacking cooling designs and weird performance curves back in the Intel days.

Isn't that at least partly because Intel over promissed and under delivered.

My desktop rig went from a recent overclocked i5 32gb ram hackintosh to an 8gb ram m1 mini when they first came out, and the performance was mind blowing. I also grabbed an m1 mbp at the same time, which demolished my previous intel mbp but the hackintosh comparison is the one that sealed the debate for me. I had a massive cooler installed and yet the m1 mini was easily twice as fast.

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.

I found the i9 in macbook pro so severally throttled most likely because of heat that it underperforms compared to a 10 year old high end i7. The i9 in that from factor is pointless IMO.

I have an Intel I9 workstation machine, I use it mainly for developement. Let me tell you something: it's the most horrible machine I've ever had in terms of performance (based on compiling a very large C code base).

> If you're going to throw a datacenter GPU

Do you mean CPU?

The funny thing is that the Threadripper isn't even a DC/Server CPU, it's a workstation CPU. The whole comparison is undermined by the design choices.

It’s undermined by comparing a laptop to a $50,000 workstation? In that it is unfair to the workstation?

In a way, yes. They use a 3995WX with 128 threads but the benchmark is single threaded?

Also, 3995WX is definitely NUMA so their benchmark is skewing the results.

This benchmark isn’t single threaded, it utilizes all the physical cores found in the machine, 64 on Threadripper and 10 on Mac.

See the source for details: https://github.com/unum-cloud/HashTableBenchmark/blob/00f94c...

according to rumours, the upcoming Mac Pro chips will have 2x to 4x the core count of the M1 Pro/Max

Whether it is fair (or not) is a value judgement. All I said was that the comparison was done poorly.

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.

It would be utterly astonishing if the the MacBook outperformed the workstation on all benchmarks. The post doesn’t claim that it does.

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.

Thanks a lot for support! It feels like some people forgot to read not just the title of the article, but also the subtitle…

I genuinely thought it was one of the most interesting articles on the M1 we’ve seen. Thanks for your work in putting it together - any follow ups would be much appreciated.

The 3995WX is a 6 grand chip. Not cheap, but you don't need to pay 50k for a workstation if you're going to compare it to a Macbook. That 1TB of RAM will be a much more significant part of the cost of the machine, but you could never get that in an M1 Mac so the cost is a useless metric.

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.

> 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.

Huh?

Sure, you can configure a cheaper server with just the hardware needed for this benchmark, this is just the fastest machine we have in our cluster RAM-wise, that has one NUMA node. That's why we added it as an extra point of reference. The core comparison is of course between two generations of MacBooks, as the title suggests.

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.

On some intel CPUs charger included with Macbook does not not satisfy CPUs power consumption. So if you ran CPU on 100%, it will use battery to get extra power, and macbook will eventually die, after battery reaches 0%.

This is not how you design "workstation". Macbooks are just toys.

[citation needed]

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.

While I don't agree with parent's declaration of all MacBooks being toys, that battery drain issue while being plugged in definitely did happen. Couldn't find a source for it just now, though. It used to happen on my 15" 2013 MacBook Pro when it was plugged in and I was playing games (BioShock Infinite was one such game).

It is easy to make my 2019 16" MBP consume more than the 96W that the included charger provides. Loading the CPU alone gets you close to that. Just add some discrete GPU work and there you go.

In fact, since connecting an external display enables the dGPU, the consumption can increase enough to get you over 96W with the CPU alone

Nope. The charger provided with 16" MBP (2019) can't delived the maximum required wattage to the MBP if everything (CPU, GPU, screen brightness) is at max usage. It's no issue for "everyday use" of most users, for sure, but for a pro machine...

Stupid, but true.

This happened with my 2019 16" MBP (i9 8-core 2.3GHz). No charger, including Apple's own 96W, was enough when doing something heavy like CPU video encoding.

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.

This would happen on my late 2013 MBP using its original charger. Playing a CPU/GPU intensive game would result in a slow net draw from the battery.

I almost had this happen on my M1 MacBook Air yesterday. I used the included charger on my M1 MacBook Air a few days ago. I was watching The Witcher Season 2 HEVC 4K HDR (so the highest quality) on it and had Cura (3D printing software) on in the background. I had the notification “MacBook is not charging”, since it was using power too fast apparently.

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.

A non-zero percentage of the world GDP originates from work done on MacBooks, to differentiate it from most “toys”. I don’t have one so I’m not talking my (mac)book here.