I'm not so sure. Some people simply need Windows and now you can't Bootcamp on ARM Macs so people will take the best Windows laptop instead.

Who knows, they might continue to offer an Intel MBP for years to come, or even add Windows ARM support if it commands enough demand. The other manufacturers have no mote here.

Windows arm is not real windows. It's not a substitute. Apple might command it's developers like a herd, moving them to whatever fancy new thing they make but windows is much more fragmented with 20+ years of backwards compatibility and tons of unmaintained software that won't be magically ported.

Current Windows on ARM seems promising with its x86 emulation so far, but still has a lot of room for improvement. Combined with the Windows 10 S sandboxing old windows apps I can see Microsoft catching up again in a few years once we have more widely available high power ARM processors.

In IT though, I don't expect any changes over to ARM hardware for another decade. I know where I work we have plenty of legacy cruft which would probably run into some weird edge cases if emulated on ARM.

Qualcomm chips are not that far behind Apple's, and Microsoft has Windows on ARM ready for a while now. Those performance advantage won't be there for long.

I think the bigger question is what does this spell for x86-64?

Uh, unless there's some new Qualcomm chip I haven't heard of, the Qualcomm chips are all being utterly crushed by Apple's offerings in geek bench and specperf.

Guess we'll see (maybe) in December (Snapdragon 875 will be announced December 1st at Qualcomms Digital Summit) - or a bit later, but the 875, now also on 5nm, supposedly will be quite a bump. Leaked (supposed) benchmarks show 30%+ improvement, which would be A14 territory.

I also have my doubts, but would be great for the market. (New Exynos 2100 supposedly also being up there.)

A 30% improvement to the 865+ starts getting close to A13 single-threaded performance, on 7nm from a year ago.

So Qualcomm won't be quite so far behind Apple, but it's still pretty significant.

Sure, more interesting than just pure CPU performance will be improvements to GPU, image processing, ML and others though - at least in my eyes.

If we'll just look at geekbench's single core bench, I'm sure Apple will still lead. (And overall likely still produce the better chips.)

Qualcomm chips don't have on-chip DRAM at the highest clock rate possible. If they did the same things Apple is doing in that way, the performance advantage of M1 shrinks. There's no real "magic" in the M1 or Apple, it's a reality distortion field that is hitting everyone right now. It's entirely possible to outperform the M1, there just hasn't been a need to do that until now - no major OS would have benefitted from an ARM on steroids before now so there wasn't even a need for it.

If you continue to degrade the quality of this site even further, we will have to ban your account. We've asked you about this more than once already.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Where have you asked me more than once? Please point me to that. If so, then I'm sorry, but I don't remember being told anything like that before this comment.

It was here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24475231

Sorry I said "more than once" — I didn't notice those two comments were in the same thread.

It's pretty amazing to me that you consider that comment "mean". How do you ever interact with the world if such a benign comment is considered "mean"? I'm serious, I just can't understand how that comment is "mean". Please try to explain it, because it makes no sense to me. Is any criticism at all considered "mean" now? Can anyone point out flaws in someone else's comment or post without being called "mean"?

> I think the bigger question is what does this spell for x86-64?

Not much?

People are acting like M1 destroys x86, but as AnandTech showed in the recent benchmark, M1 is trading blows with Zen 3 in single thread performance while having much larger core and process advantage (5nm vs. 7nm) thus being actually more expensive to produce.

Plus I would like to remind people that there were points where PowerPC Macs were extremely impressive, and that didn't magically reorder the world because existing software and OS ecosystems mean a hell of a lot more than just straight performance.

The only Zen 3 chips are desktop class, so Apple’s first generation ultra book oriented processor is trading blows with the best line of desktop processors. That’s a pretty big deal!

Note that apple has a process advantage here. AMD's 5nm chips will probably see a decent perf boost.

Zen 3 mobile chips are probably coming in the next months.

Single core performance does not differ much between mobile and desktop CPUs these days.

My concern is not with performance but the seemingly energy consumption advantage. If Arm chips perform just as well (or as we've just seen, better) than x86 chips while sipping much less power, why would anyone want x86 on mobile devices?

Are there any workloads that requires or perform better with x86?

This is clear only when you compare against an obsolete Intel which is known to be throttling power hog.

The difference might be way smaller or non-existent once we see some comparisons with latest AMD offerings (especially when we have also CPUs with comparable process).

Yeah, Anandtech's dive revealed some interesting benchmark results - such as the Zen 2 4200U part being quite close in both performance and power consumption (a little higher) to the M1 in heavily multithreaded tasks, but getting stomped in both aspects in single-threaded ones.

The M1 isn't a tiny power-sipping mobile part - it sucks power down just like AMD's 15W TDP CPUs do. The efficiency gains Apple are getting here are likely to be the result of several factors, only one of which are the CPU cores themselves.

Do we have numbers on how big the M1 is in square mm terms?

The price of the 5950X is nearly the same as the Mac Mini. Estimates on actual cost of the M1 is around $75-100.

They could have used 5600X with virtually the same single core performance as well.

You also can't compare manufacturing cost and retail cost. But given AMD cores are both smaller and manufactured on older process, it's probably safe to assume AMD ones are cheaper to manufacture.

I was waiting for AMD Zen3 to build a new desktop. But now that these tests are out, I am very, very tempted to go with Apple again. The Mac Mini numbers look comparable enough and it will be cheaper than an equivalent Windows machine (never thought I'd see this timeline).

If you can, wait. We don't know what sustained loads are going to look like, or even medium term reliability.

As they should be. Windows laptops have been embarrassingly stagnant for over a decade; they just copy Apple's innovations. This isn't an innovation that they will be able to release in their next product refresh. They're going to have to invest significant amounts of capital.

Lenovo and Microsoft had started to release ARM devices way before Apple.

Turns out software and integration matter

Yeah? And how are they looking today?

I don't know but the fact that Windows on ARM is completely locked down and only lets you install applications from the Microsoft Store made me abandon Windows as a platform for good.

It hasn't been locked down for a while now.

Satya Nadella just tweeted about their new Pluton processor. I have a feeling it won't get the same hype as the M1 but they are clearly already trying to defend.

FYI - Pluton is a security chip, not a general purpose CPU.

Ah. I haven’t been following. I thought the timing was comical but I guess less so in that case.

THIS. I saw multiple headlines calling it a processor, which may be somewhat true but it's not a General purpose processor and certainly is not a CPU. Yes, Apple's T2 chip has an A8 in it, but they don't call it a processor.

Pluton is just playing catch-up with Apple's Secure Enclave.