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A comment on Apple Silicon M1 chip in MacBook Air outperforms high-end 16-inch MacBook Pro. Parent comment

Re:Apple Silicon M1 chip in MacBook Air outperforms high-end... by adrian_b on Thursday November 12, 2020 @04:08AM (#25067936)
As expected, the Apple M1 is a little faster than Inter Tiger Lake in single-thread applications, but it is a little slower than AMD Renoir in multi-threaded applications.

So for things like software development where you compile frequently your projects, the new Apple computers are a little slower than similar computers with AMD CPUs.

So even when taking only CPU performance into consideration, there are reasons to choose other computers than those with Apple Silicon, depending on what you want to do.

Of course, nobody will decide to buy or not buy products with "Apple Silicon" based on their performance.

Those who want to use Apple software will buy Apple products, those who do not want to use Apple software will not buy Apple products, like until now, regardless which have better performance.

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Re:Apple Silicon M1 chip in MacBook Air outperforms high-end... by Tepix on Thursday November 12, 2020 @04:12AM (#25067965)
> Of course, nobody will decide to buy or not buy products with "Apple Silicon" based on their performance.

That's exactly the reason why you would chose Apple Silicon right now where you can choose between Intel and Apple SoC. There are of course other reasons such as battery life and price.

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Re:Apple Silicon M1 chip in MacBook Air outperforms high-end... by AnthonyMouse on Thursday November 12, 2020 @09:10AM (#25069980)
Not really. Right now Apple Silicon would be translating most code and therefore be slower and possibly have worse battery life. By the time that isn't true anymore, the option of buying Intel from Apple will be gone and your choices will be ARM from Apple or a PC with Intel/AMD.

The x64 options from Apple are also uncompetitive with existing PCs already because they're using Intel processors when AMD's are faster.

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Re:Apple Silicon M1 chip in MacBook Air outperforms high-end... by greedo on Thursday November 12, 2020 @02:12PM (#25073628)
Most code? I would imagine that most code run on Apple laptops today would start with Safari. And then Slack, some IDEs, etc etc. These will all get ported extremely fast if they haven't already been.

There will be a long tail of edge case software that runs in emulation, but that won't affect the majority of users.

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Re:Apple Silicon M1 chip in MacBook Air outperforms high-end... by AnthonyMouse on Thursday November 12, 2020 @03:16PM (#25074338)
That's not how the long tail works. Any given esoteric piece of software won't be used by very many people, but very many people will use some esoteric piece of software.

You also have the problem with proprietary software that even if a port exists, it's not the version you have an existing license for, and you may not be able to afford a new laptop and all new software at the same time.

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Re:Apple Silicon M1 chip in MacBook Air outperforms high-end... by greedo on Thursday November 12, 2020 @03:50PM (#25074811)
That's partially correct, and partially wrong. Long tail means that few people will buy/use a particular software package, but that if you have lots of such packages, you can make money. In the case of Apple Silicon, if there's an "esoteric" package, by definition it's only used by a small number of people.
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