Apple Silicon M1 chip in MacBook Air outperforms high-end 16-inch MacBook Pro

Re:Apple Silicon M1 chip in MacBook Air outperforms high-end... by manmal on Thursday November 12, 2020 @07:26AM (#25069063)

> it's pretty clear their focus is not their power users' focus

Depends on the definition of "power user". Music producers, video editors, and iOS developers will be served quite well.

> lenovo thinkstation p340 tiny. you can configure it with 64gb ram and core i9 with 10 cores and 20 threads for less $$$ than what an underpowered 6 core mac mini is selling for.

When making that calculation, one should also take power consumption into account. $ per cycle is very low now with the new CPU.

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Re:Apple Silicon M1 chip in MacBook Air outperforms high-end... by frank2 on Thursday November 12, 2020 @08:03AM (#25069380)

Taking power consumption into account makes sense when the machine is running on battery power, but all modern processors are power efficient enough for the cost of electricity to be negligible for a tiny desktop computer.

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Re:Apple Silicon M1 chip in MacBook Air outperforms high-end... by oddevan on Thursday November 12, 2020 @10:39AM (#25070983)

I agree for the most part; the exception would be if I were running the small machine as a server. I know this is outside of most use cases, but if I were buying a machine to have on all the time (Plex, email, whatever), I'd want to at least feel like it's not driving up my electric bill.

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Re:Apple Silicon M1 chip in MacBook Air outperforms high-end... by StillBored on Thursday November 12, 2020 @10:50AM (#25071101)

This is where idle power matters. I recently replaced a pretty low power atom in my nas with a i3-9100F. The peak power usage is probably a good 2x higher, but the idle power is just a couple watts, so I expect my average power draw to be much less since the power draw under plex/etc is about the same and the machine sits idle most of the time.

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Re:Apple Silicon M1 chip in MacBook Air outperforms high-end... by frank2 on Thursday November 12, 2020 @12:55PM (#25072548)

My tiny desktop is on all the time (but idle most of the time) and that was the frame in which I wrote my comment.

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Re:Apple Silicon M1 chip in MacBook Air outperforms high-end... by manmal on Thursday November 12, 2020 @01:23PM (#25072909)

Hypothetical scenario: You save 50W (maybe too high, maybe not), use the machine for 10h every day, and a kWh costs you €0.40 (eg in Germany). You save €0.20 per day, €73 per year, and €365 in 5 years. Definitely a factor in areas with high electricity prices.

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Re:Apple Silicon M1 chip in MacBook Air outperforms high-end... by sib on Thursday November 12, 2020 @02:34PM (#25073890)

I think for most power users, they probably generate significantly more than €73 in value from the computer every day (or maybe every hour), so they are probably not thinking too much about that savings.

(Of course, power savings are important in their own right for mobile / battery-operated use cases.)

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Re:Apple Silicon M1 chip in MacBook Air outperforms high-end... by thw0rted on Monday November 16, 2020 @09:57AM (#25112374)

"Video editors" are going to buy a machine with 8GB RAM? (Which, I assume, will be soldered to the motherboard, like all recent Apple products.) Good luck to them, I guess.

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