Apple M1 Benchmarks

[Marsdy]

Early benchmarks for Apple’s new M1 chip.

https://browser.geekbench.com/mac-benchmarks

Looks mighty impressive for entry level Macs, especially single core performance. Half as fast again as a Mac Pro 7.1 16 core!

[Ben Jenssen]

Thanks for that, Dave.
Mighty impressive indeed.
That's a lot of power for the money.
Had it not been for PT not being ready for it, I'd be ordering one right away.

[JFreak]

Just not enough memory, although you cannot directly conpare architectures like that. But 16GB is not enough yet, and they still lack USB4/TB4 inless I am mistaken


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[Ben Jenssen]

Originally Posted by JFreak

Just not enough memory, although you cannot directly conpare architectures like that. But 16GB is not enough yet, and they still lack USB4/TB4 inless I am mistaken

Yes, limited to 16gb ram, for some reason.
Still, it depends on your needs. For me, using mostly audio tracks, small sessions, 16gb works just fine. Large sessions, lots of sampled VIs and such, you quickly need more.
When I'll be needing next generation USB/TB, I don't know. I guess that is not in the near future.

[JFreak]

After last transition (PPC/Intel) it took fourth MP to perfect the design. Just need to be patient. Maybe this time things go faster as they already have the Rosetta technology available, can focus on hardware


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[Darryl Ramm]

Originally Posted by JFreak

Just not enough memory, although you cannot directly conpare architectures like that. But 16GB is not enough yet, and they still lack USB4/TB4 inless I am mistaken

The M1 based Macs have USB4 with Thunderbolt 3, the Apple development kit machines did not.

—-

These are impressive single core numbers, measuring a big core performance. But remember these synthetic benchmarks give a pretty narrow slice of performance info, and that these big.LITTLE Arm architecture systems have very different big and LITTLE core performance. And the M1 has four big cores. Still the multi core performance is not bad, but I want to see what silicon comes next with more big cores and a different thermal design point, maybe external DRAM?, more PCIe expansion?, and maybe external GPU support? Wether Apple can/would respin an M1 with more than 16GB is a hot question. It might be a thermal goals and cost constraints at the moment, cost maybe more an issue if it’s true the higher end M1 SKU uses LDDDR5 memory. But shows you what focused engineering can do, and that TSMC can fab these pieces of magic at 5nm is a reminder of how broken Intel is.

[GoButtonGuy]

Originally Posted by JFreak

Just not enough memory, although you cannot directly conpare architectures like that. But 16GB is not enough yet, and they still lack USB4/TB4 inless I am mistaken

The M1 is entry level and not meant to compete with the cheese grater or trash can. Judging from benchmarks coming into the wild there is no reason to think it wouldn't be enough for many users. It's likely to outperform most of the laptops or mini form factor rigs. In any case the swaps are in the nano seconds and not apparent under video use let alone audio. The AArch64 memory model is different than the x86 model. Same with the instruction model. When those are combined along with advances developed in SoC design there can be some pretty impressive performance improvements.

As SoC progresses (not just Apple but Qualcomm, Intel and AMD) the way in which we refer to processors and workloads will change. Specs like clock speed and RAM will be subordinated to throughputs of workloads. That's largely already happened with phones and tablets.

Were there more gigs happening (or any gigs for some) I'd have picked up an Air in the first round. I'd still not use it in production for anything Avid or Adobe. They aren't supporting it directly now so there is no telling what's lurking underneath once it gets loaded up with scores of plugs and tracks, VIs, the works.

[Darryl Ramm]

A nice M1 review here https://www.anandtech.com/show/16252...pple-m1-tested

[unkJE]

And another - (direct quote)

“Apple M1 MacBook Pro Benchmarks Are In And They Are Crazy!”

https://www.pro-tools-expert.com/pro...eid=070aa82ed2

[JFreak]

Originally Posted by Darryl Ramm

A nice M1 review here https://www.anandtech.com/show/16252...pple-m1-tested

Big thank you for this