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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 GeekyBear on Thursday November 12, 2020 @05:13AM (#25068330)
>There’s been a lot of criticism about more common benchmark suites such as GeekBench, but frankly I've found these concerns or arguments to be quite unfounded. The only factual differences between workloads in SPEC and workloads in GB5 is that the latter has less outlier tests which are memory-heavy, meaning it’s more of a CPU benchmark whereas SPEC has more tendency towards CPU+DRAM.

https://www.anandtech.com/show/16226/apple-silicon-m1-a14-de...

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Re:Apple Silicon M1 chip in MacBook Air outperforms high-end... by AshamedCaptain on Thursday November 12, 2020 @07:29AM (#25069095)
And yet here we have the M1 MacBook Air apparently beating the M1 MacBook pro, by a large margin.
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Re:Apple Silicon M1 chip in MacBook Air outperforms high-end... by AgloeDreams on Thursday November 12, 2020 @10:34AM (#25070935)
It's thought that the MBP score is due to it being ran possibly during indexing on setup. The score difference is too big, it's a single sample, and the pro still fries it at single core.
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Re:Apple Silicon M1 chip in MacBook Air outperforms high-end... by renaudg on Thursday November 12, 2020 @10:19AM (#25070767)
Based on a sample size of 1 or 2, most likely. It could be due to something as stupid as Spotlight running in the background on the MBP but not the Air.
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Re:Apple Silicon M1 chip in MacBook Air outperforms high-end... by GeekyBear on Thursday November 12, 2020 @07:53AM (#25069293)
The silicon lottery is still a thing.

I imagine they will eventually have enough chips to start binning for different performance levels like AMD and Intel do.

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Re:Apple Silicon M1 chip in MacBook Air outperforms high-end... by AshamedCaptain on Thursday November 12, 2020 @09:39AM (#25070339)
They are already binning. The air is supposed to be less powerful, with cheaper variants even having one core less.

The benchmark is just ... that accurate.

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Re:Apple Silicon M1 chip in MacBook Air outperforms high-end... by GeekyBear on Thursday November 12, 2020 @10:02AM (#25070586)
They are binning for functional GPU cores and allow chips with only 7 functional GPU cores instead of 8 to go into the lower priced Air.

They are not binning for how high the cores will clock, which is just how business is done with Intel and AMD.

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