Sadly Apple doesn't send pre-release review units to the people who actually review them property and put them to real tests. It will just be YouTubers at first who will always say it's great. But yeah, information will begin to trickle starting next week.
*** Apple event 10th November @ 6pm - One More Thing: Apple Silicon Macs Reveal ***
- Thread starter HACO
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Sadly Apple doesn't send pre-release review units to the people who actually review them property and put them to real tests. It will just be YouTubers at first who will always say it's great. But yeah, information will begin to trickle starting next week.
Agreed in general, don't mind places like Anandtech, they're at least of some use - but the rest of the generic YouTube lot who think shooting YT videos on a RED Camera and needing maxed out Mac Pros to do their workflow destroys my soul.
Interesting Video from Jonathan Morrison, not a huge fan of his content, and also know nothing about video editing but take a look and see what people think. If that's a comparable export on both then that's interesting in terms of potential performance.
https://twitter.com/tldtoday/status/1326610187529023488?s=20
https://twitter.com/tldtoday/status/1326610187529023488?s=20
That's not a good comparison of the two CPUs, A14 definitely has hardware encoding blocks for H265 and that Intel one is running on software or QuickSync. However, most end-users don't care about any of that. They just want their projects done faster.
Soldato
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The M1 will have all the same encoding blocks etc and as you say it doesn't matter how it's obtaining the performance the fact is the new Mac's are likely to be monsters when it comes to video encoding.
That's why I put in a caveat that I know nothing about video editing. It was just an interesting real-world (to me) potential comparison.
As long as Apple has implemented the encodings (source and target) and configurations are within what Apple has implemented, yes. If you move outside of these, it will be software encoding and that can be used as an actual benchmark of Apple's M1 performance cores.
Speaking of Geekbench. Scores looking juicy AF.
https://www.macrumors.com/2020/11/11/m1-macbook-air-first-benchmark/
https://www.macrumors.com/2020/11/11/m1-macbook-air-first-benchmark/
Associate
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There are currently a handful of scores for the new M1 chips up on Geekbench, have averaged them out here.
Macbook Air - M1 3.2Ghz - 8GB - Single Core = 1689. Multi-Core: 7083 (4 tests. Note that the single core score seems to be sitting just below 1700, but there is a bit more variance on the multi core. Two scores are at 7400-ish, one around 7000 and one at 6500.)
Macbook Pro - M1 3.2Ghz - 16GB - Single Core = 1714. Multi-Core: 6802 (Just one test so far here)
iMac (27-inch Retina Mid 2020) - Intel Core i9-10910 @ 3.6 GHz (10 cores) - Single Core = 1251 Multi-core = 9012
MacBook Pro (13-inch Mid 2020) - Intel Core i5-1038NG7 @ 2.0 GHz (4 cores) - Single Core = 1148 Multi-core = 4240
MacBook Pro (16-inch Late 2019) - Intel Core i9-9980HK @ 2.4 GHz (8 cores) - Single Core = 1095 Multi-core = 6869
MacBook Air (Early 2020) - Intel Core i7-1060NG7 @ 1.2 GHz (4 cores) - Single Core = 1140 Multi-core = 3080
AMD Ryzen 9 5950X -3.4 GHz (16 cores) - Single Core = 1628 Multi-core = 15744
Intel Core i9-10900K - 3.7 GHz (10 cores) - Single Core = 1410 Multi-core = 11069
Sorry not super hot on the CPU's to compare against, but found the stronger single core's to go up against...
Macbook Air - M1 3.2Ghz - 8GB - Single Core = 1689. Multi-Core: 7083 (4 tests. Note that the single core score seems to be sitting just below 1700, but there is a bit more variance on the multi core. Two scores are at 7400-ish, one around 7000 and one at 6500.)
Macbook Pro - M1 3.2Ghz - 16GB - Single Core = 1714. Multi-Core: 6802 (Just one test so far here)
iMac (27-inch Retina Mid 2020) - Intel Core i9-10910 @ 3.6 GHz (10 cores) - Single Core = 1251 Multi-core = 9012
MacBook Pro (13-inch Mid 2020) - Intel Core i5-1038NG7 @ 2.0 GHz (4 cores) - Single Core = 1148 Multi-core = 4240
MacBook Pro (16-inch Late 2019) - Intel Core i9-9980HK @ 2.4 GHz (8 cores) - Single Core = 1095 Multi-core = 6869
MacBook Air (Early 2020) - Intel Core i7-1060NG7 @ 1.2 GHz (4 cores) - Single Core = 1140 Multi-core = 3080
AMD Ryzen 9 5950X -3.4 GHz (16 cores) - Single Core = 1628 Multi-core = 15744
Intel Core i9-10900K - 3.7 GHz (10 cores) - Single Core = 1410 Multi-core = 11069
Sorry not super hot on the CPU's to compare against, but found the stronger single core's to go up against...
I’m fairly confident the new laptops will be great but did anyone find their marketing slides to be just terrible and complete none sense.
Faster than an unnamed laptop chip on a graph with no axis numbering at all.
Faster than the best selling laptop in its class but no indication of what laptop or what price it sells for.
Fastest single core performance of any PC but no comparisons or citing which processor they are comparing it to.
I get they don’t want to **** off intel when they have another year of using their kit but the cat will be out of the bag in a week. It just makes the actual claims to hard to believe when they don’t put up their comparisons or any real numbers.
Faster than an unnamed laptop chip on a graph with no axis numbering at all.
Faster than the best selling laptop in its class but no indication of what laptop or what price it sells for.
Fastest single core performance of any PC but no comparisons or citing which processor they are comparing it to.
I get they don’t want to **** off intel when they have another year of using their kit but the cat will be out of the bag in a week. It just makes the actual claims to hard to believe when they don’t put up their comparisons or any real numbers.
Associate
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I totally get not wanting to bog down with the technical details, its not necessary for the vast majority of customers and puts them needlessly in a corner when someone finds a pedantic reason they were wrong.
I've found more often than not that when Apple makes these kinds of claims, overall they hold up to be true. Why would they ruin their reputation on something like this? And what is so annoying about watching a marketing slide and waiting?
Nothing like that at all - for most of us here though we don't believe "leaked" benchmarks from any party (whether that's AMD, Intel, NVIDIA or Apple), and the majority wouldn't accept a single cherry-picked benchmark to demonstrate e.g. the performance of the latest NVIDIA graphics card.
Why should we accept a single leaked benchmark (geekbench) as gospel that the new Macs are suddenly the most powerful chips available?
I have no doubt that the new Apple chips will be fast in certain circumstances (e.g. video encoding and other common tasks that are the target market of most Mac users), but how much of that will be down to specific hardware accelerated fixed function blocks, as opposed to actual raw CPU power?
If it was easy to take an off the shelf ARM design, sprinkle some magic fairy dust on the relevant parts and provide across the board gains, then Intel or AMD would have done it by now, and found a way to sell it to the growing ARM server market.
This isn't a chip designed by ARM, this is a custom chip designed by Apple, using the ARM instruction set.
Same here.
And Geekbench/SPEC don't run on fixed function blocks, either. And Anandtech has reviewed A14 so it's not Apple leaks or cherry picked benchmarks, and to extrapolate that M1 would be similar is reasonable, unless you disagree?
But this discussion is pointless since in a week these devices will be out and we'll see more
Never said it was easy or magical. There's nothing special about ARM ISA, the competition just stagnated themselves into this situation where their 50x lead in performance 10 years ago is now more or less completely gone (against Apple) and is down to maybe 1.5x (against other ARM competitors).
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Semantics. It uses the ARM instruction set and has evolved through several generation based on older chips that were at one stage licensed ARM reference designs (up to and including the A5 I believe)
Without a doubt AMD and Intel could both do the same if they believed the performance was worth chasing.
AMD do currently have some ARM products but haven't pushed it (https://www.amd.com/en/amd-opteron-a1100), and Intel had plenty of history with their XScale Arm based chips.
That's the only thing we can agree onBut this discussion is pointless since in a week these devices will be out and we'll see more
I completely disagree, in the past they always compared to their own products (e.g. A14 vs A13 etc). They say exactly what they are comparing it to and therefore you can get a meaningful idea of the relative performance.
The difference in this case is that they are comparing it to an unnamed presumed intel laptop CPU and ‘the best selling laptop in the segment’.
That’s completely different and isn’t keeping it simple for non-technically minded people, just utter nonsense.
All they had to say was, to our last gen MacBook Air or the Dell <insert uninspiring laptop here> and those claims would have been perfectly valid.
The problem is no one can even test those claims because they have no idea what those products were. it’s ludicrous they can get away with it, it’s utterly ludicrous that you both just dismiss the issue and defend Apple on this point.
Imagine if a car manufacturer advertised their car as getting better MPG than ‘another car’, they’d be laughed out of town.
Don’t get me wrong I am seriously considering buying one but I’m not dropping £1k on a laptop until some non-Apple shills have got their hand on it and attempted to test the claims.