Thursday, November 12th 2020
Apple's M1-Based MacBook Air Benchmarked
When Apple announced that they are going to switch their Mac lineup from Intel-based x86 processors to the custom "Apple Silicon," everyone was wondering how the new processors will look and perform. To everyone's luck, Apple has just a few days ago announced its first Apple Silicon custom processor for MacBook. The M1, as the company calls it, is their first processor designed for higher-power and performance tasks The M1 features eight CPU cores (four high-performance and four-high efficiency) paired with eight cores dedicated to the graphics. On the die, there is also a 16-core neural engine made to accelerate machine learning tasks found in the new applications.
Today, we are getting the first GeekBench 5 CPU benchmarks that showcase just how far Apple has come with its custom design. What we have is the M1 processor found in MacBook Air. This Mac model features a passive cooling system, cooling a CPU with a base frequency of 3.2 GHz. The system scored 1719 points in the single-core result, and 6967 points in the multi-core result. The single-threaded results measure itself with some of the highest-end offerings from Intel and AMD, while the multi-threaded results are very good given the mix and match of small and big cores.
Source:
GeekBench 5
Today, we are getting the first GeekBench 5 CPU benchmarks that showcase just how far Apple has come with its custom design. What we have is the M1 processor found in MacBook Air. This Mac model features a passive cooling system, cooling a CPU with a base frequency of 3.2 GHz. The system scored 1719 points in the single-core result, and 6967 points in the multi-core result. The single-threaded results measure itself with some of the highest-end offerings from Intel and AMD, while the multi-threaded results are very good given the mix and match of small and big cores.
117 Comments on Apple's M1-Based MacBook Air Benchmarked
While not a performance king, the raw performance is indeed great for the price (assuming MacAir can give this score), let alone the superior battery life.
Now we just need to see how apps transition fairs.
That was the initial point regarding Geekbench
Now people are starting to get their macs. The more I see, the more I start to think : considering what those machines are being used for, this is brilliant. CPU wise The 4800u (15w) is the only thing that come close to be as interesting. Gpu wise it's time for vega to die and for rdna2 to replace it in the zen 3 apu. If you need a light machine with a great battery life and a good screen for photo editing graphic design, and a bit of video editing those machine are nice while not being that expensive compared to equivalent Pcs. (a cheap fast, small windows laptop with a 400-500 nits screen and at least 100% sRGB, doesn't exist, trust me, I've looked. Pc manufacturers like to cheap out on the screen a lot)
It will be interesting to see what AMD will do with the 5800u.
Architecturally it does not seem too exciting. They went wide and slow to get the efficiency where they wanted it. Manufacturing costs of M1 are probably way above what competition is currently doing.
It would be cool to know what the die size of M1 is but there has been no official data as far as I can find and I cannot estimate from the SIP image because no idea what the memory chips and their sizes are.
For some idea how large of a chip we are talking about - this is more than Radeon VII (13.6B) and almost the same size as GA104 powering RTX3070 (17.4B).
Renoir (4800U) is reported to have ~9.8B transistors.
Granted, M1 has additional stuff like Neural Engine, ISP, AES encryption, encoder(s)/decoder(s), Thunderbolt controller. On the other hand, some or most of that also exists for example in Renoir.
There are tradeoffs, amount of USB ports seems to be limited, it does not seem to have PCIe, max 16GB RAM and there is probably a reason it only runs up to 10W (if nothing else then marketing, definitely).
2.6TFLOPS for iGPU is impressive for the power envelope but again I am quite sure they went wide and slow to keep the power usage down.
For comparison, 2.5TFLOPs is something like RX560 can do with 3B transistors. Renoir does 2.1TFLOPs in desktop SKUs (8CU running fast). Both obviously use a hell of a lot more power.
If you're in the market for an ultrabook, unless you use some app that isn't available on the Mac side, it's pretty hard to recommend a Windows laptop now.
Spam that F for Intel and AMD in mobile.
Can't wait to see where they take the 2nd gen version.
Endless pastures,
Winner sheeps,
Master lambs.
It's all scrollable bleat.
But there are other bench such as those performing video encoding does look amazing, plus those Javascript tests with native Chrome/Safari.
M1 at least perform well when there is an optimized version of software, and isn't really limited to a small scope of task like creation.
It's not there yet but so much potential very impressive for such a new tech.
That SoC is mighty impressive all that CPU, GPU, AI and RAM at 10W.
I want to see 65w version.