btarunrMaxon ported the / its latest Cinebench R23 benchmark to the macOS "Big Sur" Apple M1 platform, and the performance results are groundbreaking.

You couldn't decide right away, could you?! I'd say another classical case of; “How I'm supposed to know what I think before I hear read what I said wrote.“

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AquinusI think people are forgetting that this 10w chip

That's not true, Anandtech estimates it's really more like 20-24W.

Let's get down back to earth people.

Aquinusimagine what they can do with 45 watts.

Burn a hole through your laptop. :laugh:

There is another reason besides just battery life and efficiency that they chose not to give these more power, those dense over sized cores with huge caches probably become impossible to cool realistically and keep in check under a high power budget.

NordicI really want to see what they can pull of in a 30w, 60w, and 90w package. This is some cool stuff.

Honestly, I'd expect the same as would happen if you would feed a 5950X 600W - it'll go boom.

Vya DomusThat's not true, Anandtech estimates it's really more like 20-24W.

Let's get down back to earth people.



Burn a whole through your laptop. :laugh:

There is another reason besides just battery life and efficiency that they chose not to give these more power, those dense over sized cores with huge caches probably become impossible to cool realistically and keep in check under a high power budget.

I see a lot silly people quoting Anandtech to support their false claims today, you are insulting Anandtech by lying about what they said. Anandtech's review specifically says "wall power to the PSU". That's the entire system and before efficiency loss from the power supply. Including the GPU and ram most importantly. The old Mac Mini easily used 85W. So it uses 1/3 of the old Mini and is way faster, including having an up to GTX 1650 GPU, and you are trying to say the opposite. How much do the comparable CPU cores use vs Ryzen and Intel? Much less.

SearingI see a lot silly people quoting Anandtech to support their false claims today, you are insulting Anandtech by lying about what they said. Anandtech's review specifically says "wall power to the PSU". That's the entire system and before efficiency loss from the power supply. Including the GPU and ram most importantly. The old Mac Mini easily used 85W. So it uses 1/3 of the old Mini and is way faster, including having an up to GTX 1650 GPU, and you are trying to say the opposite. How much do the comparable CPU cores use vs Ryzen and Intel? Much less.

www.anandtech.com/show/16252/mac-mini-apple-m1-tested

Read the damn thing before talking.

These figures are generally what you’d like to compare to “TDPs” of other platforms, although again to get an apples-to-apples comparison you’d need to further subtract some of the overhead as measured on the Mac mini here – my best guess would be a 20 to 24W range.

Vya DomusThat's not true, Anandtech estimates it's really more like 20-24W.

Let's get down back to earth people.

You mean like how the "45 watt TDP" with the i9 9880H in my laptop actually draws more like 65-68 watts under full load? :laugh:

20-24 watts is still a lot less than 65-68 watts. That's like 1/3 of the power for 90% of the performance.

AquinusYou mean like how the "45 watt TDP" with the i9 9880H in my laptop actually draws more like 65-68 watts under full load? :laugh:

20-24 watts is still a lot less than 65-68 watts.

What I meant had to do with power density, 25W on TSMC's 5nm is very different to 25W on Intel's 14nm.

AquinusYou mean like how the "45 watt TDP" with the i9 9880H in my laptop actually draws more like 65-68 watts under full load? :laugh:

20-24 watts is still a lot less than 65-68 watts. That's like 1/3 of the power for 90% of the performance.

It is not the 10 Watts constantly touted either, is it.

theoneandonlymrkIt is not the 10 Watts constantly touted either, is it.

Sure, if you pay attention to just that single piece of information in a vacuum.

Vya DomusWhat I meant had to do with power density, 25W on TSMC's 5nm is very different to 25W on Intel's 14nm.

Doesn't power density become a bigger problem with smaller nodes? I'm not exactly sure where you're going with this.

AquinusSure, if you pay attention to just that single piece of information in a vacuum.

Doesn't power density become a bigger problem with smaller nodes? I'm not exactly sure where you're going with this.

I'm not the deluded, apple have worked a miracle guy here though, am I.

theoneandonlymrkI'm not the deluded, apple have worked a miracle guy here though, am I.

What I see is Apple releasing a chip that does almost as well as what I have but with a 1/3 of the power. That's an accomplishment whether you want to accept that or not.

AquinusWhat I see is Apple releasing a chip that does almost as well as what I have but with a 1/3 of the power. That's an accomplishment whether you want to accept that or not.

I am happy to say this is a good chip and very capable, it'll be put into something I won't ever use though.
But I am admittedly an apple hater so there's that.
This CPU is good but let's be honest and realistic about it's capabilities that's all. .
Eh I'm honest about the hate at least.

And let's see how well it does in your actual use before lauding it up too that's all.

AquinusWhat I see is Apple releasing a chip that does almost as well as what I have but with a 1/3 of the power. That's an accomplishment whether you want to accept that or not.

It is an achievement but again as AT stated an Apples to Apples comparison is nearly impossible here, what you're basically comparing is a Mac (ecosystem) with a competing performant one, in that I'd argue zen3 mobile APUs would get damn close to that efficiency with a node disadvantage. Chips at higher TDPs & clocks are actually less efficient, Zen has always had much better efficiency under 3GHz & same goes for Intel.

Regardless of the opinions about Apple though it is something to celebrate in & of itself, if this doesn't wake Intel up & kick them where it really hurts you can bet Intel is going the way of IBM.

PunkenjoyThe performance of the M1 in 5 nanometer is where i would expect it to be. I don't find it game breaking and they already implemented most of the tricks that x86 use. The architecture is getting mature and they aren't really way more performance than x86.

modern processors are just so much more complex than just the instruction set that in the end it do not really matter. at least for pure performance. for low power, x86 still seem to have a bit higher overhead...

But the thing is ARM is getting more powerful by using more transitors and more power. It's not the 4 watt cpu in your phone that is doing that...

I am not an apple fan, but i am glad they do something powerful because we need competitions. AMD is starting to compete again and there is a lot more performance gain each year than when Intel and Nvidia had 0 competition.

Good stuff indeed, good stuff...

I have to say you must be the most optimistic person I've seen towards ARM, if this is in line with your expectations. Up until now even large, high-powered server ARM chips have only competed with x86 on absolute performance in scenarios where they have had a core count advantage and the workload is heavily multithreaded, and that includes 7nm. So if your expectation from 5nm was for an ARM SoC to suddenly take the lead in single-threaded performance, that's quite the jump you were expecting!

This obviously isn't the most revolutionary thing ever, but it's a much bigger achievement than you're giving them credit for.

Vya DomusClock speed and voltage, it's that simple. L1 caches basically have to run close to the clock speed of the core so their power scales right along with it (badly), that being said at 3 Ghz it's kept in check, for now. It's still inefficient though considering the performance gains from having up to 6 times more memory, you can bet the hit rate didn't go up by 600%. That's why L3 caches grew so much larger over the years because they don't have to scale along side with the cores themselves and why large L1 caches are avoided like the plague even outside x86.

There's definitely an open question of whether such an architecture can scale to higher clocks and power levels at all - I'm rather skeptical of that, at least for this design, though I'd be surprised if whatever they whip up for the Mac Pro doesn't hit ~4GHz at least in low-threaded boosts - there's definitely power and cooling to spare for that in those cases. As for L3 caches, AT reports the LLC on the M1 as 16MB, so that's half the size of Zen 3 on the desktop, though also 4x the size of a Renoir CCX. The more interesting thing is how Apple shares their L2 cache between cores, making comparisons difficult of course. (Not to mention the LLC being shared across all parts of the SoC further making comparisons to current X86 SoCs and CPUs difficult.) You're likely entirely right that the increase in cache hits from the 6x increase in L1 cache is nowhere near 1:1, but it's obviously still worth it in enough workloads for Apple to be willing to go that route, and also clearly efficient enough to not hurt them.

Vya DomusOf course because again, Intel and AMD design their cores with the goal of being able to fit as many as possible on a single package, hence smaller but higher clocked cores which are also less power efficient.

But there is another company which proves my point more than anyone else, ARM themselves, they're also close to extracting similar performance out of cores that are even smaller and consume way less power and area than Apple's. I'll maintain my opinion that Apple's approach is the wrong one long term.

ARM is nowhere close to the performance of this, or even the mobile A14. Even the X1 cores will be way, way behind. Sure, AT's comparison numbers are just from A77 cores, but look at those performance differences! Sure, peak power is higher, but we've seen plenty of examples of how poorly A-series ARM cores scale upwards in power in various poorly optimized phones ("gaming" phones with high-clocked SoCs etc.). I'm optimistic that the X1 will be a first step towards getting non-Apple ARM cores that are at least in the same ballpark as Apple's cores, but current options are nowhere close to what Apple delivers. Also, the X1 is supposedly a much bigger core than A-series cores.

TheLostSwedeLet's also not forget that the memory is shared between all the parts inside the SoC, which might affect performance negatively in some scenarios as well.

Why would Apple ever go as high as 90W? We might see some 15-25W parts next, but I doubt we'll ever see anything in the 90W range from Apple.

Shared memory is definitely going to be a severe bottleneck, as is the measly iGPU bandwidth. That might explain a lot of the delta between synthetic/compute workloads (and very light gaming like 3DMark Ice Storm) vs. real world gaming such as SotTR in AT's numbers. It'll definitely be interesting to see how their chips for MBP 16" and iMacs look in this regard - will they go with some sort of dual memory interface? Will they go stupid wide LPDDR4X? DDR4 would frankly shock me at this point.

As for seeing 15-25W parts next ... isn't that what this is? ~<10W in the MBA, probably ~15-20W in the MBP, ~20-24W in the MM. And, seemingly at 3.0/3.1/3.2GHz, which doesn't bode well for the frequency scaling for this design, though of course we don't have low enough level access to actually know for sure. I would expect the next part to be for the MBP 16", in the 30-50W range, and likely with a much bigger GPU. 8 big cores, 4 small ones, 16-64GB of RAM and ~32 GPU cores?

AquinusI think people are forgetting that this 10w chip is competing with chips that have TDPs as high as 35-45 watts. Come on, let's gain a little bit of perspective here. It's not the best, but it's pretty damn good for what it is. If this is what Apple can do with a 10w power budget, imagine what they can do with 45 watts.

~20-25W, not 10W.

ValantarI have to say you must be the most optimistic person I've seen towards ARM, if this is in line with your expectations. Up until now even large, high-powered server ARM chips have only competed with x86 on absolute performance in scenarios where they have had a core count advantage and the workload is heavily multithreaded, and that includes 7nm. So if your expectation from 5nm was for an ARM SoC to suddenly take the lead in single-threaded performance, that's quite the jump you were expecting!

This obviously isn't the most revolutionary thing ever, but it's a much bigger achievement than you're giving them credit for.

Well you overthink this. CPU architecture are all about compromise and design choice. High count arm cpu were made to be in datacenter and have as many core for hyperscaller. Not necessarely to compete on single thread performance. Design choice have been made to have more core even if that imply less single core performance.

Apple with their M1 and other Apple CPU have a different focus, they are looking for single core performance (but not much on multithread performance) as they think it's what deserve them the most. It do not means that a16 core M1 would 1. be doable commercially and 2. beat the 5950x.

It also do not means that AMD or Intel can't do better single core performance, but when you have a limited amount of power and a limited amount of transitors, it's all a matter of choice.

AMD and Intel use mostly the same architecture for laptop up to datacenter. Some focus on datacenter and right now, Apple designed it's M1 for customer devices and they made their design in consequence.

There is also the process node difference, i think that a AMD or Intel CPU on 5nm would face them way better than right now. The CPU instruction set right now it's more a religion or something to cheer for than a real thing when it come to end performance. Both ARM and x86 have a front end to decode instruction, both have backend execution units, both use SIMD.

In the end it's a matter on how well you use your transitor and what is your end goal. For Apple, it's integration + Single Thread performance. For AMD, it's flexibility (chiplets) and maximum performance).

For intel, well i am not sure even intel know right now but that is another subject...

dyonoctisIt's a design philosophy that works well for those machine, but AMD already said that they are not interested in an Hybrid design.

They recently patented technological approaches and algorithms to shift compute-threads in a heterogeneous environment (aka hybrid architectures) according to their needed instruction-set extensions – by arrange the threads across given big.LITTLE-cores, based on their instruction set fully autonomously in the silicon itself.

Thus, they patented a way to make scheduler-fixes needless in any heterogenous environment – they wouldn't've had done that if they don't plan to also make big.LITTLE designs, like for real.

Those official statements are just there to appease the competition and cosy Intel, nVidia, ARM et al. all along.
Just like how they lulled Intel into that (false) sense of security when they proclaimed their own official capitulation in '11 and how they would strike sail and that they henceforth, awed before Big Blue™, would content theirselves with just getting the fallen breadcrumbs – just to strike back even harder out of nowhere like they did with their Ryzen.

Seems I'm the only one having the firm believe, that AMD – under the condition that ARM/RISC-V reaches any greater significance and/or broader adaptation (read: market-saturation) – could rather spontaneously come up with some ARM-bases (RISC-V-) designs on their own pretty quick, likely even following such a hybrid nomenclature.

Since they never ever stopped their work on their K12 in the first place, it was just postponed indefinitely and put on hold in favour of what we now call Zen – and curiously enough, just a few months ago, AMD's K12 popped up again out of nowhere … Now remember who came to visit AMD to work on the AMD ARMv8-A-based K12-design … That prospect, it's thrilling already, isn't it? ツ

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Chrispy_If the M1 does anything, it might finally get Microsoft to hurry the hell up and ditch all the legacy crap that is bogging down x86 Windows.

With x86 and Windows playing a chicken-and-egg game, it's never going to become a more streamlined architecture until someone takes the first step. AMD and Intel can't afford to cull features in hardware until they are dropped from the OS, and Microsoft is still unwilling to completely let go of 32-bit OS even in this day and age....

AMD and Intel could just do a 32-bit/64-bit bigLITTLE approach make one chip 32-bit only and the other 64-bit only.

R0H1TIf this doesn't wake Intel up & kick them where it really hurts you can bet Intel is going the way of IBM.

If intel fails to remain relevant in the consumer PC industry you just know they'll become patent trolls instead.

Vya Domuswww.anandtech.com/show/16252/mac-mini-apple-m1-tested

Read the damn thing before talking.

Yes you should read the darn thing before talking. You are trying to mislead people.

Intel's 18W chips don't draw 18W running AVX Prime95. You can't say "TDP vs TDP", the 20W estimate is total power draw under max compute. We aren't dumb enough to consider the 10900k a ~100W part either.

Anandtech are the experts here, and they wrote an entire article about Intel's TDP shenanigans, and yet you are using them to attack Apple's power consumption, oh the irony.

Take a look at this graph in comparison, here is the compute power consumption for Tiger Lake, just the package power. Peak power consumption is double the M1. And the M1 is faster. Sure nobody knows the exact package power for the M1, that is a problem with Apple's locked down approach, but let's not pretend the M1 uses more power than it does. You don't want to see how much power my Tiger Lake laptop uses in comparison, and it drops below 2.5ghz at 18W and gets crushed by the M1. If you want to be scientific about it we'll have to wait until we can run the same workloads and record the joules used :)

So the M1 scores 7508 points in the multi-core test. Wow, I get close to14,000 in R23 in Mac OS Big Sur with my 3700X Hackintosh. Let's hope Apple has something else up their sleeve as the iMacs and Mac Pros will be severely gimped in performance compared to equivalent X64 desktops.

BansakuSo the M1 scores 7508 points in the multi-core test. Wow, I get close to14,000 in R23 in Mac OS Big Sur with my 3700X Hackintosh. Let's hope Apple has something else up their sleeve as the iMacs and Mac Pros will be severely gimped in performance compared to equivalent X64 desktops.

You mean like putting 8 of these in a mac pro? Pretty sure that will be the plan. Single thread performance is already good, all they need is more cores:



:laugh: mini tower.

phanbueyYou mean like putting 8 of these in a mac pro? Pretty sure that will be the plan. Single thread performance is already good, all they need is more cores:



:laugh: mini tower.

Touchè! That is something Apple would do.

I see a lot of "what if"* comments. They fact that M1 is not cleanly swept under the rug with no arguments means that Apple is getting within striking range of x86-64 champions.

*what if = 7nm vs 5nm? Equal power draw? This and that benchmark? Mobile/Server/HEDT/? vs Intel Gen8/9/10/11 or Zen1/2/3/4? etc.

FourstaffI see a lot of "what if"* comments. They fact that M1 is not cleanly swept under the rug with no arguments means that Apple is getting within striking range of x86-64 champions.

*what if = 7nm vs 5nm? Equal power draw? This and that benchmark? Mobile/Server/HEDT/? vs Intel Gen8/9/10/11 or Zen1/2/3/4? etc.

It also has a lot to do with mac OS itself. I just upgraded my Hackintosh to Big Sur and even on X64 everything, including Metal performance, jumped %50+ depending on the app/workload. It's too bad that Cinebench auto-updated itself to R23 so my old baseline of R20 5095 Multi-core in Catalina is meaningless.

BansakuIt also has a lot to do with mac OS itself. I just upgraded my Hackintosh to Big Sur and even on X64 everything, including Metal performance, jumped %50+ depending on the app/workload. It's too bad that Cinebench auto-updated itself to R23 so my old baseline of R20 5095 Multi-core in Catalina is meaningless.

They have a big advantage in OS and hardware integration, sure. However we will rarely if ever use one without the other so M1+macOS needs to be taken as one package instead measuring each discretely.