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Comment by Andrew_nenakhov | Hacker News Reader

Interestingly that devices on M1, per geekbench scores, all have basically identical performance. So in the end, M1 Mini, MacBook Air and MacBook Pro differ only in the number of ports and the availability of a built-in display.

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Arguably this is a drawback of M1; it can't use more than ~20W even if you have more power and cooling available.

I don't see why that would be the case on a hardware level. Unlocking power limit (and maybe voltage) controls would be nice if just to see how far it can be pushed.

Intel had unlocked TDP/TPL on many i7 chips and lower end models had exactly the same performance as higher end models (assuming equal core/thread/cache count) heh

For single-core performance, yes. Anything that can make use of multiple cores, no

Most M1 devices have indentical number of cores.

That’s not true. The M1 has 8, the M1 pro has 10, and the M1 ultra has 20.

I was not talking about pro and ultra devices. "M1" != "M1 Pro"

> So in the end, M1 Mini, MacBook Air and *MacBook Pro* differ only in the number of ports and the availability of a built-in display.

Yes you were.

https://www.apple.com/macbook-pro-13/ has the M1.

No, I was not. I even did a table last time I shopped for new devices for our developers:

  Model                            Processor       Geekbench multi/single core score

  MacMini (2020)                   M1, 8 cores      7782/1747 
  MacBook Air M1                   M1, 8 cores      7618/1734
  MacBook Pro (13-inch Late 2020)  M1, 8 cores      7739/1753
  iMac (24-inch Mid 2021)          M1, 8 cores      7660/1742

2021 models do come with M1 Pro processors come with 8 and 10 cores, and have 9900 and 11700 multicore score respectively, but I was not talking about them.

It’s easy for people to make this assumption since all of the Apple Silicon chips are “M1” but some are “M1++”. It helps to avoid that misunderstanding by talking about baseline M1 or non-pro M1 chips.

Depending on the config, the M1 Pro has 8 or 10 cores - and unlike the M1, the M1 Pro's 8 core configuration uses 6 performance cores and 2 efficiency cores vs 4 / 4

Well, and in number of cores, battery life, acoustics, Watts, and some more....

The point is only about processing power. Previously, mini/air/pro lines on Intel all had wildly varying performance. Now many of Apple devices share identical processors and do not differ in this regard.

(Of course there are now models with differen processors from the latest generation of products, but i wasn't talking about them)

for the baseline M1 that is true, though the Air can do throttling under sustained load since it does not have any fans for active cooling.

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