I "downgraded" from a top spec Macbook Pro 2019 16" i9 9980HK with 64GB RAM to the new 14" M1 Pro with 32GB. Fans are at 0 RPM all the time, I haven't heard them yet. It compiles the same Android project without a sweat and with 0 RPM fan speed. The i9 was hitting 100C and maximum RPM in the same use case and took maybe three times longer. And the new macbook was about 25% cheaper than the 16" I bought in 2020. It's a completely different league - worth all the money I spent.
I went from a 2012 retina macbook pro to a maxed out (except storage) 14" M1 Max. The performance difference keeps blowing my mind on a daily basis. One Android project I sometimes work on took ~45 minutes for a release build on the old one but only 11 on the new one — and as it turns out I had spotlight indexing stuff in the background the whole time, and the SDK is still x86 so it runs through emulation. Fans do spin up sometimes but you have to try really hard to make it happen. On the old macbook the fans were spinning literally all the time and the CPU temperature has never fallen below around 60° on idle. That part of the case above the keyboard was always hot to the touch, on the M1 it's barely warm.
Part of that is Intel cannot get to low enough wattage on their mobile chips to sustain anything more than a quad core for very long. AMD is beating them but ARM is in a league of its own after decade+ of mobile focused development.
I'm excited to see how this changes x86 systems, mobile and desktop.
I did the same but to an Air 16gb. Much cheaper, mostly faster and doesn't have the quirks I had with the 16". I had it replaced 3x and it's was still shit; overheated and 3x just completely died... It was the most expensive computer I bought in since the 90s (Sun or SGI were more expensive) and it was a total horror show. Apple did give me new ones no problems but they never worked well for me; fans always on and burning so hot that it was uncomfortable to work on. This new air is really fabulous; always snappy and it does not heat up at all. It's actually a bit too cold.
The m1 air is the star of the show for me, because it is a machine that overdelivers to such a degree. I got one to replace my laptop, and to my surprise discovered that it outperforms my i5 9600K desktop, by a noticeable margin, without even getting warm. Also, it’s really nice to finally have actual all day battery life. For the brief window that our offices reopened I would leave my charger at home and still have 20% to 30% left by the end of the day.
A colleague is working on the same project with an Air 16GB and doesn't complain. It's crazy that it doesn't even have active cooling and can be used for serious CPU intensive work.
The 16" model was a big Apple failure. I had to use it in clamshell mode with an external monitor because having the macbook open with an external monitor would make the macbook run a lot hotter and the fans would spin much louder all the time. That was a pretty well known problem with the GPU and they never fixed it (probably some HW issue).
Exact same issues, I just changed my MB Pro Intel core i9 16" for a M1 Max 16", it's the biggest technological jump I have ever seen and the M1 Max is even cheaper.
I have a 16" M1 Max, fully loaded. The thermal profile on this thing is insane, here is a screenshot of the internals after being on for a couple of hours with a bunch of chrome tabs open https://imgur.com/a/yjXxdvJ its barely warmer than body temperature.
Also note for anyone on the fence about being 1-inch larger,
the 16 inch model is the same physical size as the 15-inch models and they removed a lot of bezel. the screen has the same camera/sensor notch as an iphone does, which allows them to extend the screen farther.
full screen videos are letterboxed 99% of the time so the notch blends into. I don't play full screen games so can't tell if thats an issue. and it is in the OS top bar the other rest of the time.
Exactly. Same for me (except 16GB). I am programming all day (multiple IDEA projects open) and have probably 200+ tabs open in Chrome and Safari. Not a sweat.
I keep saying, the best Apple advertisement are all other computers (and Windows/Android operating systems). It's like they're not even trying!
These are good real world examples, and the other comments here in confirmation of the performance and energy benefits are pushing me towards Asahi Linux when it is good enough/close enough to be roadworthy. At that moment, Apple can have my money for an M1 Pro.
Same experience with a M1 16GB. I have never felt such a jump in experience from a laptop to another. The M1 stays cold and silent and the battery lasts much longer, it's simply incredible.
Even when I tried to throw games at it. It exceed my expectations.
I skipped the fan entirely and went from Macbook Pro Intel I9 to Macbook Air M1. Plenty of performance, much better battery time and size is more comfortable than the 14"/16".
I went from a maxed out late 2019 to a maxed out M1 max (except ssd). The M1 is so much better it’s almost crazy and I can finally use my 2 LG 5k monitors again without the machine coming to a crawl. In a lot of ways the 2019 was worse than my previous one which I believe was the 2017 model. Glad Apple finally listened to what people wanted and made a laptop that works, added some ports back in and got rid of the terrible Touch Bar.
I met with a coworker recently who has the intel macbook and I was shocked to hear the amount of noise coming out of the thing while just running the basic programs we need to run. It was even discharging while plugged in until they closed enough stuff and turned docker off. Meanwhile I haven't had any issues with the M1.
I’m using TurboBoost Switcher Pro to battle this issue. It keeps the machine cool(er) and thus quiet(er). Combined with the VRM cooling mod, it is doable with heavy workloads. Battery life is still bad though and now the bottom gets very hot.
Yeah,we know. But consider the this: your baseline is a shit laptop. Apple knew they were releasing a turd. Maybe even did so semi-intentionally because that would make new chips seem even better.
My personal Ryzen 5800H powered Lenovo doesn't overheat and I haven't heard the fan I over a month despite doing all kinds of lightweight development and browsing on it.
Meanwhile, my fairly expensive work issued 6 core Intel Xeon Lenovo from 2019 sounds like it's about to take off throughout most of the day.
YMMV though, I briefly owned a 5900HS/3080 Zephyrus G15 and though it was indeed a powerhouse, it absolutely got more hot and way WAY more noisy than my 16” M1 Pro does now doing the same things, while overall not being as nice of a laptop (far worse screen, somewhat chintzy build, meh speakers, barrel power connector, huge power brick, bad battery life, etc).
That G15 was better at some things than my M1 Pro is now but not by enough that I’d want it over the M1 Pro, even considering the price difference.
This thread is really interesting to read because if the same thread had been made a couple of years ago, before Apple released its M1 laptops, it would have been filled with Apple fans who would be saying that the Intel MBPs were the best thing since sliced bread and that the users were doing something wrong.
I think the only time Apple fans actually accepted that an Apple product was actually bad was the trashcan Mac Pro, and that was only because they went half a decade without upgrading it and they replaced a beloved design with one that was branded as a trash can.
I have a 2018 MBP with i9. The fans drive me crazy. I remember once I was in a meeting with my PhD student who was sitting across from me. The MBP was on my desk in clamshell mode placed in between us. Suddenly its fans started and my student jumped from the chair because the fan noise was so intense. It's been more than 3 years and the fans are still noisy. Just to be sure, there is no lint inside it. I cleaned it just the last week.
There is now doubt the M1 is very much cooler, but they also made the laptop much thicker to allow sufficient airflow without hitting the fans. I am pretty confident that this is the main reason to make it so much thicker than the Intel one
I also downgraded from the top 16” intel mac but to the 13 inch pro. I’m thinking I might keep it as it’s almost as powerful as the new M1 with much much longer battery (new 14 inch battery is comparable with older intel macbooks).
While the M1 is definitely impressive, Apple has been known for their lacking cooling designs and weird performance curves back in the Intel days.
This comparison maybe Apples to Apples, but it's not really apples to apples. Modern Intel and even older Intel can bring a lot more to the table than the Mac Pro from a few years back could deliver because of Apple's design decisions. You could make the argument that you're just benchmarking Apple Macbooks to choose a platform to run macOS on, but then the datacenter CPU doesn't really add anything.
If you're going to throw a datacenter GPU into the comparison, at least grab a modern Intel chip for your benchmarks. The 9980HK is from two years ago, back when Intel was already losing ground to AMD. The 10th, 11th and 12th gen processors made significant performance improvements since then (12900HK performing twice as well in some benchmarks compared to the 9980HK), at the cost of thermals and power usage.
The M1 will probably still beat a modern Intel chip, but by a significantly smaller margin in terms of performance (battery usage, though, is a whole different story).
It’s down to brute force raw power and performance per watt nowadays. Apple mostly wins the latter but the former is inevitably going to kill demand for those climate unfriendly servers due to cooling and powering problems. We await the high end Mac systems with much interest.
If your machine is perpetually sitting on your desk then that doesn't really matter. For personal use, power and thermals are only a serious concern away from your desk.
My 3950x runs circles around the M1 work has me use. I use both for the same task. Apples to apples.
My desktop rig went from a recent overclocked i5 32gb ram hackintosh to an 8gb ram m1 mini when they first came out, and the performance was mind blowing. I also grabbed an m1 mbp at the same time, which demolished my previous intel mbp but the hackintosh comparison is the one that sealed the debate for me. I had a massive cooler installed and yet the m1 mini was easily twice as fast.
I couldn't get my hands on the 16gb versions at launch, and for the first year they were still so much faster even when swapping 6-10gb but I am feeling the ram crunch a bit these days. I recently upgraded the rest of my team to the new 14 inch pros with 32gb ram and I'll be grabbing one for myself when I have the time next year to do a time machine transfer.
I found the i9 in macbook pro so severally throttled most likely because of heat that it underperforms compared to a 10 year old high end i7. The i9 in that from factor is pointless IMO.
I have an Intel I9 workstation machine, I use it mainly for developement. Let me tell you something: it's the most horrible machine I've ever had in terms of performance (based on compiling a very large C code base).
On some intel CPUs charger included with Macbook does not not satisfy CPUs power consumption. So if you ran CPU on 100%, it will use battery to get extra power, and macbook will eventually die, after battery reaches 0%.
This is not how you design "workstation". Macbooks are just toys.
A non-zero percentage of the world GDP originates from work done on MacBooks, to differentiate it from most “toys”. I don’t have one so I’m not talking my (mac)book here.
Might also be worth pointing out that there is no mention of "battery" in that blog post.
The M1 Max is already a beast of a chip, and lots has been written on HN and elsewhere about how it knocks the socks off the competition. I'm not going to repeat all of the stuff that has already been written all over the internet.
But the most impressive party piece of the new M1s is surely that they can knock the socks off the competition whilst running on battery and can do so for a decently sustained period of time.
All of the remotely viable competition I am aware of needs to be plugged into the mains at all times otherwise you get a very throttled experience.
Apparently the Asus Zephyrus beats it on a number of benchmarks by a large margin, but I'm not sure if those were just GPU benchmarks, and I'm not sure if those were on battery tests. Linus Tech Tips did a recent comparison.
The Asus probably also runs hotter and requires more use of fans. And I doubt the battery will last as long on intensive tasks.
A big part of the M1 performance per watt efficiency is the SoC integrated design. I'm no motherboard designer but I think it would be nigh on impossible to replicate it using discrete component systems (which I assume is what the Asus is).
Will caveat my comment here with a note that I haven't looked at comparisons for a while, only around the time the M1 was launched.
LPDDR5, which was correctly labeled later in the article. LPDDR5 is not a variant of DDR5. Hence the title DDR5 powered is inaccurate.
>Cores have massive L2 blocks for a total of 28 MB of L2.
24MB + 4MB. Only 24MB is shared between HP Cores. There is also an additional 48MB of System Level Cache on Max ( 24MB on Pro ). So in reality the cache difference on Mac system is the reason for most ( but not all ) of the performance difference.
>Printing was done via the 5N TSMC lithography standard.
N5.
>Memory bus was upgraded to LPDDR5 and claims up to 400 GB/s of bandwidth.
On Max only. The Pro only has 200GB/s. As the previous headline claimed with both M1 Pro/Max. Agains this is probably nitpicking.
> On Max only. The Pro only has 200GB/s. As the previous headline claimed with M1 Pro/Max. Agains this is probably nitpicking.
That's already a huge amount for a bloody laptop, probably more relevant is that CPUs are not able to come anywhere near saturating memory bandwidths on the Max: Anandtech tested the memory subsystem[0] and it caps out at around 110 per performance cluster (which you only need 4 cores to reach, with 2 cores already coming close: individual cores reached 102GB/s each), plus around 20 for the efficiency cluster.
> That's already a huge amount for a bloody laptop
It's about on-par with modern-ish dedicated laptop GPUs. The mid-range GTX 1060 mobile from 2016 does 200GB/s, a RTX 3070 mobile from this year does ~450GB/s.
Yes they are only really needed for the GPU. But then I dont want people to think M1 Pro has the same 400GB/s memory bandwidth as M1 Max just from reading the article. Again, nitpicking.
Ditto all the comments about swapping from 2019 MBP to 2021 MBP and being silent and powerful again.
The other big game changer is battery life. My top of the line 2019 i9 would chew through battery on Zoom. I could barely get 1.5 hours… which makes the term ‘laptop’ a little silly.
The 2021 can run long enough I don’t pay any attention to the battery, which is the point of a laptop - mobile computing.
General computing is even better, people didn’t even bother bringing their power supplies to work anymore with the M1. They could go all day doing development and the occasional meeting.
Power consumption and MagSafe are the hidden gems of the M1 models imho.
Right? How is video decoding not an optimized chip level operation on modern systems? It’s network traffic and video decoding… it shouldn’t required an i9 going full bore.
What really impressed me in this was not the expected M1 to older x86 performance gap (that poor i9 must have been throttling for the whole benchmark while the fans were preparing the laptop for takeoff) but the fact you can get a much faster laptop with 4x as much memory for about the same price from Apple just a couple years later…
The Intel chipsets were limited for a long time in that they could only support a maximum of 16GB of LPDDR ram. Yet another reason Apple must have been frustrated with Intel.
The price given in the article is not correct though, the 16" M1 Max 64GB is actually 3.900 USD (and I presume this is before sales tax, I'm from a country where advertised prices include VAT).
Did I miss it or did the author fail to mention the most important variable of this comparison, specifically, the frequency at which the memory of the AMD server CPU was operating at.
If you're doing memory benchmarks, why omit such essential details like memory frequency, as this can have a bigger impact here than the CPU itself?
The entire thing seems incredibly half-assed e.g. they're testing a 64 cores CPU on single-threaded workload (literally the only mentions of threads is that they "disable multithreading"), they repeatedly harp on the server being "over 50k" but the CPU is 5 so I can only assume most of the 50k are in the
> 1 TB of eight-channel DDR4 memory
which you apparently need to... bench hashmap lookups?
The mac's pricing seems pretty bullshit as well as the lowest price to get 64GB is $3500 (Max with 24 GPU cores, and a measly 512GB SSD), which does not qualify as "around $3000" in my books.
Its configured with the fastest memory possible on the Threadripper. The exact specs and RAM stick models match the ones mentioned in the preceding article, I have linked below. We didnt include those, as we don’t know the exact specs of RAM modules in MacBooks.
Setting aside the fact that Threadripper is not really a server CPU, it tops at DDR4-3200 when it comes to memory support. Considering the custom build, it seems the most likely option. (As in, why would it use anything slower for no good reason?)
The Threadripper Pro has 1TB memory, which means it's likely ECC registered, which is slower at the same frequency, and it might not even be DDR4-3200 in the first place because it's rather new in ECC, and server hardware manufacturers like to use old stuff.
Funny that everyone does benchmarks and goes ooh and aah at the bigger numbers. Or complains about apples to hazelnuts.
How about this: I do NOT want a space heater on my desk or under my desk. I have a separate heating system thank you. Looks like the MxBlaBla chips can deliver good performance and stay cool.
Now if Apple would hurry with the MxBlaBla desktops... I don't need a new laptop atm.
I have the opposite complaint. I couldn’t care less about heat or battery life. I want the fastest possible machine, period. And too many articles about M1 discuss heat and efficiency which I just don’t care about.
Readit News
I'm excited to see how this changes x86 systems, mobile and desktop.
Deleted Comment
the 16 inch model is the same physical size as the 15-inch models and they removed a lot of bezel. the screen has the same camera/sensor notch as an iphone does, which allows them to extend the screen farther.
full screen videos are letterboxed 99% of the time so the notch blends into. I don't play full screen games so can't tell if thats an issue. and it is in the OS top bar the other rest of the time.
I keep saying, the best Apple advertisement are all other computers (and Windows/Android operating systems). It's like they're not even trying!
My personal Ryzen 5800H powered Lenovo doesn't overheat and I haven't heard the fan I over a month despite doing all kinds of lightweight development and browsing on it.
Meanwhile, my fairly expensive work issued 6 core Intel Xeon Lenovo from 2019 sounds like it's about to take off throughout most of the day.
That G15 was better at some things than my M1 Pro is now but not by enough that I’d want it over the M1 Pro, even considering the price difference.
I think the only time Apple fans actually accepted that an Apple product was actually bad was the trashcan Mac Pro, and that was only because they went half a decade without upgrading it and they replaced a beloved design with one that was branded as a trash can.
This comparison maybe Apples to Apples, but it's not really apples to apples. Modern Intel and even older Intel can bring a lot more to the table than the Mac Pro from a few years back could deliver because of Apple's design decisions. You could make the argument that you're just benchmarking Apple Macbooks to choose a platform to run macOS on, but then the datacenter CPU doesn't really add anything.
If you're going to throw a datacenter GPU into the comparison, at least grab a modern Intel chip for your benchmarks. The 9980HK is from two years ago, back when Intel was already losing ground to AMD. The 10th, 11th and 12th gen processors made significant performance improvements since then (12900HK performing twice as well in some benchmarks compared to the 9980HK), at the cost of thermals and power usage.
The M1 will probably still beat a modern Intel chip, but by a significantly smaller margin in terms of performance (battery usage, though, is a whole different story).
Isn’t this the whole point? Sure if you give Intel a bigger thermal envelope it will do better than the M1 but that really is Apples to oranges.
My 3950x runs circles around the M1 work has me use. I use both for the same task. Apples to apples.
Adding in some gasoline would be apples-to-oranges.
Isn't that at least partly because Intel over promissed and under delivered.
I couldn't get my hands on the 16gb versions at launch, and for the first year they were still so much faster even when swapping 6-10gb but I am feeling the ram crunch a bit these days. I recently upgraded the rest of my team to the new 14 inch pros with 32gb ram and I'll be grabbing one for myself when I have the time next year to do a time machine transfer.
Do you mean CPU?
This is not how you design "workstation". Macbooks are just toys.
I've only ever seen this happen if you use the lower wattage charger from a 12" Macbook Air with a higher spec'd Macbook Pro.
The M1 Max is already a beast of a chip, and lots has been written on HN and elsewhere about how it knocks the socks off the competition. I'm not going to repeat all of the stuff that has already been written all over the internet.
But the most impressive party piece of the new M1s is surely that they can knock the socks off the competition whilst running on battery and can do so for a decently sustained period of time.
All of the remotely viable competition I am aware of needs to be plugged into the mains at all times otherwise you get a very throttled experience.
A big part of the M1 performance per watt efficiency is the SoC integrated design. I'm no motherboard designer but I think it would be nigh on impossible to replicate it using discrete component systems (which I assume is what the Asus is).
Will caveat my comment here with a note that I haven't looked at comparisons for a while, only around the time the M1 was launched.
Apple chips still win, but nowhere near with the same margin as those breathless marketing posts are trying to advertise.
>How a DDR5-powered MacBook.....
LPDDR5, which was correctly labeled later in the article. LPDDR5 is not a variant of DDR5. Hence the title DDR5 powered is inaccurate.
>Cores have massive L2 blocks for a total of 28 MB of L2.
24MB + 4MB. Only 24MB is shared between HP Cores. There is also an additional 48MB of System Level Cache on Max ( 24MB on Pro ). So in reality the cache difference on Mac system is the reason for most ( but not all ) of the performance difference.
>Printing was done via the 5N TSMC lithography standard.
N5.
>Memory bus was upgraded to LPDDR5 and claims up to 400 GB/s of bandwidth.
On Max only. The Pro only has 200GB/s. As the previous headline claimed with both M1 Pro/Max. Agains this is probably nitpicking.
That's already a huge amount for a bloody laptop, probably more relevant is that CPUs are not able to come anywhere near saturating memory bandwidths on the Max: Anandtech tested the memory subsystem[0] and it caps out at around 110 per performance cluster (which you only need 4 cores to reach, with 2 cores already coming close: individual cores reached 102GB/s each), plus around 20 for the efficiency cluster.
[0] https://www.anandtech.com/show/17024/apple-m1-max-performanc...
It's about on-par with modern-ish dedicated laptop GPUs. The mid-range GTX 1060 mobile from 2016 does 200GB/s, a RTX 3070 mobile from this year does ~450GB/s.
The other big game changer is battery life. My top of the line 2019 i9 would chew through battery on Zoom. I could barely get 1.5 hours… which makes the term ‘laptop’ a little silly.
The 2021 can run long enough I don’t pay any attention to the battery, which is the point of a laptop - mobile computing.
General computing is even better, people didn’t even bother bringing their power supplies to work anymore with the M1. They could go all day doing development and the occasional meeting.
Power consumption and MagSafe are the hidden gems of the M1 models imho.
It must be the desire of users and developer laziness that chews all the batteries.
If you're doing memory benchmarks, why omit such essential details like memory frequency, as this can have a bigger impact here than the CPU itself?
> 1 TB of eight-channel DDR4 memory
which you apparently need to... bench hashmap lookups?
The mac's pricing seems pretty bullshit as well as the lowest price to get 64GB is $3500 (Max with 24 GPU cores, and a measly 512GB SSD), which does not qualify as "around $3000" in my books.
https://unum.cloud/post/2021-11-25-ycsb/#our-toys
How about this: I do NOT want a space heater on my desk or under my desk. I have a separate heating system thank you. Looks like the MxBlaBla chips can deliver good performance and stay cool.
Now if Apple would hurry with the MxBlaBla desktops... I don't need a new laptop atm.