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.