I'm very curious to see some real benchmarks. I have no doubt that they've achieved state of the art efficiency using 5nm, but I have a harder time believing that they can outperform the highest end of AMD and Intel's mobile offerings by so much (especially without active cooling). Their completely unit-less graph axes are really something...
Read the fine print at the bottom, the claims they are making seem very..... not backed up by their testing. They chip they say they beat that makes them the best in the world is the last gen mackbook with an i7
Their claimed 3x faster is massive even if the baseline is low. And they also achieved that vs. the Mac Mini's 3.6GHz i3. So I don't think fastest singlethread performance is an outlandish claim.
Historically speaking, Apple doesn't underdelivier on their claimed numbers. I'm excited to see what they'll do with a full desktop power budget.
Which was severely underpowered because the cooling solution was knee-capped. This is partly Intel's fault, but they made their last-gen so underwhelming that this _had_ to be better
If they could outperform AMD/Intel today, they would've offered 16" MBPs / iMacs / Mac Pros. Today, they have power-efficient chips, so they converted their low-end machines, and Mini so that companies porting their software can start migrating their build farms.
I don't see why they need to rush into the higher end. Let ARM chips prove themselves for consumer scale. Enterprise is going to be weary of the new tech and potential compatibility issues. Proving it in the consumer market makes far more sense, and they really get to flex the benefits in something like a macbook air. Fanless, silent, and huge battery life increases are really tangible upgrades.
A beefy chip in an MBP 16 will be exciting, and I'm sure they are working on that, but it will make far more sense once ARM is established in the "normal" consumer models.
They probably beat AMD/Intel on perf/power efficiency, which is why it makes sense for MBA and 13" MBP.
The smaller machines are also likely held back by cooling solutions, so if you have Intel beat on power efficiency in a tiny form factor, you can boost your clock speed too.
Considering how AMD also beats intel on power/perf by a wide margin and they compared their results against Intel CPUs I wouldn't be surprised if their power/performance was close to AMD (they do have heterogeneous CPU cores which of course is not the case in traditional x86)
Apple's perf/watt is much higher than AMD. Anandtech has the A14 within a few percent of the 5950X on single threaded workloads. Power consumption is 5 watts (entire iPhone 12) versus 49 watts (5950X package power).
Normalizing for performance (say A14 vs 5950X at 4.5GHz instead of 5GHz) would close the gap somewhat, but it's still huge. Perhaps 4x instead of 10x - those last 500MHz on the AMD chip cost a ton of power.
Of course, none of this is particularly surprising considering Apple is using both a newer process and gets nearly 60% higher IPC.
AMD's Smart Memory Access would like to have a word. I'd note that in unoptimized games, they're projecting a 5% performance boost between their stock overclock and SMA (rumors put the overclock at only around 1%).
I would say on your topic though that Intel has a hybrid chip that might interest you. Lakefield pairs 4 modified Tremont cores with 1 Sunny Cove core.
I think that we will see how this pans out in practice - but power efficiency is not something I associate with Intel - they just seem to far behind in manufacturing process to be competitive.
We don't even have new Zen 3 mobile chips yet if they are anything like the New Desktop parts we just got last week then everything Apple just put out is FUBAR.
I'm hoping Zen 3 delivers because 4000 mobile chips shows great promise but is not available in anything premium (MacBook pro level) and has supply issues.
That being said Apple has an advantage in that they control the entire stack and on the power efficiency side of things they have experience with mobile CPU design, they can do stuff like heterogeneous cores and can optimise for it throughout the stack, I think it would be challenging for x86 to do the same.
- Same text editing shortcuts that work consistently throughout all apps in the system including your editor/IDE, browser, and terminal.
- iTerm2 having so called "legacy full screen mode" that I use exclusively. (I've been searching for something similar for windows/linux for quite some time).
- The general system polish and usability. This is not directly "dev experience", but it's something you interact with while doing development throughout the day and it's just hands down a lot better than anything linux has atm.
> - iTerm2 having so called "legacy full screen mode" that I use exclusively. (I've been searching for something similar for windows/linux for quite some time).
Is that about disabling animations? That can be done globally on windows and linux desktop environments.
No, it's about window being in a non-exclusive fullscreen mode. It's fullscreen, but at the same time can be on the background underneath other windows. Looks like this:
Ah, that's basically a frameless maximized window. It requires some tinkering but there are tools to force that behavior on other applications; for both windows and various linux window managers.
So if I understand they have the exact same chip in the Air as the Pro? Will better thermal make that much of a difference? Is there really that big of a reason to get Pro over Air at this point?
Better thermal will make a big difference for anything where you need high power for a long period. Like editing video for example. Anything where you need only shorter bursts of power won't make as big of a difference.
But better thermals will probably mean they can run the CPU in the Pro at higher base clock speed anyway, so it will probably be faster than the air all around - we'll have to wait for benchmarks to know for sure though.
It seems likely the higher end of the performance curves are only attainable on the systems with active cooling. Or at least only sustainable with active cooling. So the MacBook Air would still realize the efficiency gains, but never the peak performance on that chart.
The fact that, like in most industries, it's easy to catch up and very hard to beat once you do. It's very telling that Apple didn't compare their M1 with something like AMD Zen3.
