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Comment by mrtksn | Hacker News Reader

Does anyone have an idea how would the situation would be with Apple M1 if actually pushed as hard as this CPU? Sure, Apple doesn't allow it out of the box but are we out of luck for hacking it? Would it actually have dramatic performance increase when overclocked? Is Apple leaving some performance on the table in order to achieve silent operations?

All the tests I've seen with Apple M1 vs Intel, have been between Apple M1 chilling at full load vs Intel being cooled with a loud and powerful cooler(or liquid nitrogen in this case). What if M1 was held at 100C with loud and powerful cooler or liquid nitrogen?

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It depends on if the M1 can clock that much higher or not when given the thermal & power headroom. The M1 architecture internally could have other bottlenecks that limit how high it can clock.

See for example why clock speed records are filled with things like the AMD FX, even though Zen{+,2,3} is on paper (and in practice) a way better CPU - the older AMD FX just clocks really really well, even though it's otherwise a pretty crap CPU. Or for another example from history, the disaster that was P4 Prescott compared to the Core 2 that replaced it.

Apple is using a high density library on TSMC 5n. I'd be surprised if golden samples could hit even just 4GHz on LN2.

You would theoretically get something akin to the latest Intel processor running at over 10 GHz.

I fully expect that once Apple releases their server class CPUs at the end of this year we’ll get something that’s equivalent to the latest Intel processor running at 7 GHz.

> I fully expect that once Apple releases their server class CPUs at the end of this year

I assume you mean MacPro by this. I haven't seen anything indicating something bigger than the M1 Ultra coming anytime soon(pre-2024). Hell, the M1 Ultra itself was a surprise to me.

I saw M2 mentioned somewhere, but not sure if we'll see it this year.

When you say server-class, do you mean for desktops? Thought I just read recently that Apple is ending Mac OS server.

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