Apple aims to sell Macs with its own chips starting in 2021

Re:Apple aims to sell Macs with its own chips starting in 2021 by greendave on Thursday April 23, 2020 @11:40AM (#22957166)

I'm always a bit suspicious about x86 vs. non-x86 micro-benchmarks. I remember all the fun people had with ByteMark back in the day, and while I assume that Geekbench doesn't play those sorts of games with compiler optimizations, I would really like to see data from something a bit more representative of a real-world CPU-bound application (short-lived is fine, just not synthetic).

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Re:Apple aims to sell Macs with its own chips starting in 2021 by qppo on Thursday April 23, 2020 @01:33PM (#22958479)

Geekbench isn't a micro benchmark, it's a comprehensive test of the system using a variety of programs and workloads and aggregates the results. It's not a single program that one can play games with compiler optimizations.

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Re:Apple aims to sell Macs with its own chips starting in 2021 by DCKing on Thursday April 23, 2020 @01:56PM (#22958787)

I should have clarified that Geekbench can be more accurately described as a set of microbenchmarks. It does test a lot of different kinds of performance, but it does not test sustained performance.

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Re:Apple aims to sell Macs with its own chips starting in 2021 by qppo on Thursday April 23, 2020 @02:14PM (#22959047)

I don't like arguing semantics but I don't really think any of what Geekbench does is a "micro" benchmark. At least for me that typically refers to running a small snippet of code, like calculating a dot product or something. Geekbench tests whole program performance.

It's not aida64 but it is a pretty decent metric, and consistent.

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