I'd wait for actual benchmarks just judging by the amount of parachute clauses in the disclosures. Power consumption numbers should be great but I'm guessing it falls flat on some compute tasks that can't leverage custom instructions.

From Anandtech:

"Apple claims the M1 to be the fastest CPU in the world. Given our data on the A14, beating all of Intel’s designs, and just falling short of AMD’s newest Zen3 chips – a higher clocked Firestorm above 3GHz, the 50% larger L2 cache, and an unleashed TDP, we can certainly believe Apple and the M1 to be able to achieve that claim."

Not sure what the custom instructions you're referring to are.

How many cores does that have, and how many cores does the i7 have though?

Why is this a mystery or rhetorical question? Look on the website? It's public:

M1

> Apple M1 chip

> 8-core CPU with 4 performance cores and 4 efficiency cores

> 8-core GPU

> 16-core Neural Engine

Intel

> 1.7GHz quad-core Intel Core i7, Turbo Boost up to 4.5GHz, with 128MB of eDRAM

https://www.apple.com/macbook-pro-13/specs/

https://www.apple.com/shop/product/G0W42LL/A/refurbished-133...

Apple's claim:

> With an 8‑core CPU and 8‑core GPU, M1 on MacBook Pro delivers up to 2.8x faster CPU performance¹ and up to 5x faster graphics² than the previous generation.

https://www.apple.com/shop/buy-mac/macbook-pro/13-inch-space...

Fine print:

> Testing conducted by Apple in October 2020 using preproduction 13‑inch MacBook Pro systems with Apple M1 chip, as well as production 1.7GHz quad‑core Intel Core i7‑based 13‑inch MacBook Pro systems, all configured with 16GB RAM and 2TB SSD. Open source project built with prerelease Xcode 12.2 with Apple Clang 12.0.0, Ninja 1.10.0.git, and CMake 3.16.5. Performance tests are conducted using specific computer systems and reflect the approximate performance of MacBook Pro.

> Testing conducted by Apple in October 2020 using preproduction 13‑inch MacBook Pro systems with Apple M1 chip, as well as production 1.7GHz quad‑core Intel Core i7‑based 13‑inch MacBook Pro systems with Intel Iris Plus Graphics 645, all configured with 16GB RAM and 2TB SSD. Tested with prerelease Final Cut Pro 10.5 using a 10‑second project with Apple ProRes 422 video at 3840x2160 resolution and 30 frames per second. Performance tests are conducted using specific computer systems and reflect the approximate performance of MacBook Pro.

The 2019 MBP 13 supposedly uses an 8th gen, 14nm Intel part (14nm is 6 year-old technology).

A more fair comparison would be Tiger Lake (20% IPC improvement) on Intel's terrible 10nm process. The most fair comparison would be zen 3 on 7nm, but even that is still a whole node behind.

> The 2019 MBP 13 supposedly uses an 8th gen, 14nm Intel part (14nm is 6 year-old technology). A more fair comparison would be Tiger Lake (20% IPC improvement) on Intel's terrible 10nm process. The most fair comparison would be zen 3 on 7nm, but even that is still a whole node behind.

I'm not sure exactly what your point is. The fact it is IT IS on a better node. That's probably a big part of the performance picture. But, as a user I don't care if the improvement in performance is architectural or node. I just care that it's better than the competition.

I agree, but the real question becomes whether users would prefer 11th gen Intel processors or zen 2/3 over what they're shipping now. Would you take AMD seriously if they started talking about how their 5950 beat an ancient 8th gen Intel processor? I expect a higher standard from hardware makers and don't give a free pass to anyone over that kind of shenanigan.

We'll see third party benchmarks in less than a week and then this discussion is moot.

Do you really? It’s nice if it’s faster (and a hard sell if it’s slower) but really most people aren’t going to do the same things on a Mac they are going to do on a Windows laptop. You can’t run Windows or Windows software on these Macs. And it’s really no use to compare for instance Office for Windows to Office for Mac.

It depends on how you define fair. The base level M1 MBP is the same price as the previous generation Intel MBP and has the same amount of ram and storage. So in terms of a generation-on-generation comparison, it's absolutely fair for Apple to position the benchmarks that way.

Yes, Wikipedia says it's i7-8557U which has 8 MB cache.

So comparing a

4-Core, 5nm, 16 MB cache, 10 watts TDP vs

4-Core, 14nm, 8 MB cache, 15 watts TDP.

https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/192996/...

4 + 4 vs 4 hyperthreaded I think. Not sure I follow the point though.

The new Apple chip has more cores, so faster performance doesn't necessarily mean faster single-core performance. Faster on a parallel benchmark doesn't necessarily translate into faster performance for most real-world scenarios. That is all. That being said, I do believe Apple has very competent chip designers.

From Anandtech

Apple claims the M1 to be the fastest CPU in the world. Given our data on the A14, beating all of Intel’s designs, and just falling short of AMD’s newest Zen3 chips – a higher clocked Firestorm above 3GHz, the 50% larger L2 cache, and an unleashed TDP, we can certainly believe Apple and the M1 to be able to achieve that claim.

Thats per core performance.