You're not wrong but the article is still a 9th gen laptop i9. A desktop i9 is quicker - https://cpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Intel-Core-i9-9880H-vs....

I still don't understand why people can't get that not all i9s are the same. That's literally what this title is implying ... Which isn't even the article's title ... Maybe someone will edit it so people stop assuming they mean the i9-10900k ...

Also i9 doesn't mean "fast" it just means it is the most expensive of its generation. You will get much closer to M1 performance using a mobile 11th gen i7 than with any i9.

Intel likely intended people to mix up the processors like this because they could easily have marketed a distinction between them.

But the Ryzen 3900X is a desktop processor, right? This is crazy - definitely was not expecting the M1 to be _better_ than the 3900X.

also ... single core performance

m1, like the a* chips are great at single core performance m1, like the a* chips are underwhelming at multi-core performance last gen ryzen was competitive at single core performance, and great at multicore current gen ryzen is great at both

This isn't correct.

A fair number of these benchmarks were multithreaded, and the M1 held its own very well, despite being at a substantial disadvantage (8 threads (only 4 on performance cores) for M1 versus 24 for Ryzen 3900X).

That said, single threaded performance is extremely important, since not everything can be parallelized. Amdahl's Law, eh?

Don't worry though, I'm sure Apple Silicon is coming with many more cores. Amazon's Graviton2 shows how ARM can perform with massive core counts...

As to the current Ryzen (5000 series), it's a great chip and what I'm planning to use in a new build, but it also has a 105W power budget. We'll see what Apple produces for its desktop entries soon enough!

It’s a desktop processor, but also last generation. The latest Ryzens are the 5xxxx series, and the performance improvement is substantial.

Just a quick note, the MacBook Air is by no means "ultralight" even by Apple standards, 2017 MacBook for example was more than twice lighter. Thinkpad laptops are also measurably lighter than any current generation MacBook.

Yes, Apple's current lineup is a little confusing. The 13" Pro and 13" Air are so similar, and almost the same weight.

I still use a 12" MacBook, and it's just amazingly small and light. If Apple makes a 12" MacBook with a M1, it would be awesome. A dream machine for me.

> M1

I don't have any insider knowledge but I am fully convinced (and so are many others) that we will see a newer Apple ARM based processor before the end of 2021. If you are a programmer and you have a machine to work on, I'd say hold out for the next one.

Apple hardware resells extremely well and if you don't want to deal with the hassle of reselling privately you can can also trade it in for a decent return.

If you're not on a super tight budget it's not terrible to just pick up the new machine and swap it out for the next one that ships if you want to.

In my mind the resell value of intel macbooks dropped significantly with the M1 release. Not sure if that's reflected in the second hand market already, but I think it will.

I'm curious about this too. I actually think it won't because even with the huge amount of marketing for this new chip that apple is doing, the average consumer doesn't explicitly care about the cpu.

Agreed! Even dreamier if they bring back the magsafe and upgrade to the current keyboard with function keys.

> If Apple makes a 12" MacBook with a M1, it would be awesome.

I wish Apple would make everything" MacBooks with M1. I hate that I have to wait another year or whatever for a 15/16" screen and will have to pay a measurable weight penalty to get it when nothing stops them from making a 15" ultralight model now that they don't need fans for stunning performance.

They might go with a processor bump for the 15”. And maybe more thermal headroom and an external GPU. Hard to predict.

But most people don't need or even care about those things. Making the MB or Air body bigger (not thicker) and just increasing screen, battery, and heatsink size proportionally while keeping it fanless would knock everything else out today for like 99% of people.

I am typing this on M1 Air, and it's noticeably smaller and lighter than our 2013 MB Air. I'd say that in terms of size it's quite close to 12" Mb which we owned previously, and maybe just a tiny bit heavier.

> I'd say that in terms of size it's quite close to 12" Mb which we owned previously

If true, then neither are close to the 2017 12" MB.

> and maybe just a tiny bit heavier.

It's almost a pound heavier.

The X1 Carbon, which is what I assume you're referring to with Thinkpad, is 2.6Lbs vs 2.8Lbs for the 2020 Macbook Air.

That's 90g of difference ... I'd say that qualifies for Ultralight still.

The new X1 nano is 907g (1.99 lbs), so the Macbook Air at 1.29kg is 42% heavier.

https://www.lenovo.com/us/en/coming-soon/ThinkPad-X1-Nano/p/...

Still running last-century processors though.

Only in the sense that your car is running on 4000 BC wheels.

From the page linked to:

> 11th Generation Intel® Core™ i5-1130G7 Processor

From https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/series/...

> Launch Date: Q3'20

Ah, wasn't aware of that!

Current gen X1 Carbon is 2.4 lbs: https://www.lenovo.com/us/en/laptops/thinkpad/thinkpad-x1/X1...

> more than twice lighter.

Under half the weight?

Non-native English speakers (depending on their native language) will often use phrases like that. As that is how they say it in their native language.

Plenty of native speakers too, I've been hearing it all my life. "Twice as cheap" is another.

That's not true though, the air weighs at 1.27 kg whereas the 12" macbook weighs at 0.92 kg.

That's about a quarter lighter but not anywhere near half.

What does 'more than twice lighter' even mean?

It surely wasn't less than half as heavy. So what do you mean?

I think they're more light than ultralight. Otherwise the performance stands.

LG Gram 2020: 2.07 lbs

MacBook 2017: 2.03 lbs

MacBook Air 2020: 2.8 lbs

MacBook Pro 2020: 3.0 lbs

Apple deliberately kept the form factors of these the same for this launch. It will be interesting seeing where they go from here form factor wise.

Also... I suspect benchmarking the LG or the 12" MacBook versus the Air would be pretty humiliating.

We pretty much already know.

14-inch and 16-inch with same size but thinner bezels are expected to next year.

I think the 12" MacBook is going to make a comeback.

MacBook Air 2019 (Intel): 2.75

MacBook Pro 2019 (Intel): 3.02

As far as I see the M1 models aren't heavier than the Intel ones? But run much longer before they have to be recharged, spending much less power.

All these gains will be entirely swallowed by software in a few years.

The purpose of hardware engineering is to make up for the short falls of software engineers.

Electron apps or worse.

Not just Electron apps. I've seen people on Twitter gushing about how seamless and flicker-free is switching between screens and resolutions on M1. And yet, there's literally no reason why it can't be done today, now, on the existing hardware.

Instant waking from sleep was one of the key points in M1's presentation. Something my 2007 model Macbook Pro could do. But then the subsequent releases of MacOS just couldn't do that. Despite significant increases in disk speed, and CPU speed, and RAM speed.

We are effecivey running supercomputers. And we can't seem to be able to do anything with them.

> But then the subsequent releases of MacOS just couldn't do that.

How instant? My late 2016 MBP wakes in around a second. My 2014 Mac mini usually takes only a few seconds.

As instant as in the keynote video. IIRC around the time of Lion I started seeing a progress bar as it was coming out of sleep.

Now, especially if you require password you need to wait a second or so after it wakes up, because input is no longer immediately available. And then it takes some time to actually wake up and start the window server etc.

What makes you think AMD/Intel can do instant display resolution changes?

What exactly prevents them from doing just that? 3.2 GHz not enough to negotiate screen resolution? HDMI/DP link that M1 produces is some otherworldly HDMI/DP not available to anyone else?

I have an example right here, in front of me. I have a Dell monitor. My Macbook Pro is connected to it via Thunderbolt/USB-C->HDMI. My Windows box is connected to it via DP.

So, I'm on my Windows box, playing a game. I turn on my Macbook Pro, and it shows me a proper resolution on the laptop screen. The laptop sees that the display is on, and I see that many windows are missing because they are on the other screen. So, I switch my display from DP (coming from Windows) to HDMI (coming from my Macbook Pro).

The only thing that changes is the source input to the display.

And yet. Macbook takes up to 10 seconds to renegotiate the resoltion again. First it slowly disconnects from the display, screws up the resolution, brings all the windows to the laptop screen. Then it reconnects to the display, renegotiates the resolution and restores the windows as they are supposed to be.

Why? And what is so magical about the M1 CPU that it seemingly can do this in an instant? There's nothing magical: whoever implements all this crap simply doesn't care. And in a couple of years M1 (or M1 X Pro whatever) will forget how to to that just as MacOS forgot how it could instantly wake up from sleep 12 years ago.

You haven't proved it's possible to do any of that on Intel hardware - sleep and display config are both very HW driven. Software can't do everything.

- Did the displays change for M1? No.

- Did the protocols such as HDMI and DP change for M1? No.

- Did the Extended Display Identification Data [1] change? No.

That leaves two things:

- The OS that matches the extended data against what the user wants

If the OS is responsible, then there's nothing stopping others from doing what Big Sur does.

- graphics cards that actually pump out pixels and have their own support for possible resolutions

If graphics card is responsible, you're asking me to believe that M1 is driven by fairy pixel dust and has some magical powers that are absolutely impossible on any other hardware?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extended_Display_Identificatio...

One can easily foresee this actually happening if chip designs start to diverge from the standard and the only common thing is that you can run a browser on it.

Imagine AWS launching ec2 instances with M1 chips!

They recently announced the mac.metal instance type for EC2 instances[0]. They currently only have Intel instances but I can’t see why the newer M1 instances aren’t coming soon.

[0] https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2020/11/announcin...

They are coming, but they will be crippled because of Apple licensing terms. The minimum rental period is 24 hours (every time you turn it on) so it's quite useless for e.g. occasional build.

They have graviton, which is already more efficient by a huge margin (against intel per dollar).

More efficient than Intel i-series or more efficient than M1?

more efficient per dollar against their intel counterparts.

AWS can set their own price (or subsidize it to keep people on their cloud), more efficient per $ is not really a good way to judge how good is the chip, though it is a good measure for how much money will stay in your pocket.

True, but I believe graviton is still not like M1. Do they support i386 / backward compatible?

M1 is not i386 compatible. macOS uses a translation layer through Rosetta 2 for x86 compatibility.

Sorta - There is translation layer in software but the reason the M1 is so fast at executing x86 code is that it has hardware support for switching to the x86 memory model. This is something no other ARM processor I'm aware of has.

Is this true? I didn't see this detail anywhere I looked. If you have a source that would be interesting.

It was previously discussed here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25233554 but I can't find the primary source linked anywhere.

> Do they support i386

No. But for many use cases that’s not a big deal, since you’re likely to be running Linux & other open source software that already has ARM versions or can be recompiled.

Yeah seeing a MacBook Air beat an i9 is hilarious.

I think this should put arguments over X86 efficiency disadvantages to bed. The X86 is obviously a huge boat anchor. There is no other explanation for this monstrous of a performance efficiency gap... unless Apple has invented something fundamentally new that has never been done in the entire history of CPU design. I doubt that.

I doubt the instruction set is the only (or even the main) advantage M1 has. Apple just has been hiring some of the best talent in the field for a long time now that have been working on their phone/tablet chips and now used their talents on the M1.

There is a lot you can do to improve a CPU without changing the instruction set or manufacturing process just by doing a better job at designing the CPU itself. (look at Ryzen 5000 series with 15 to 20% IPC gain over the 3000/4000 series while staying on the same manufacturing process for example)

Basically there is a lot to gain just by doing a better design on the CPU itself. Also faster CPUs/GPUs allows one to build faster CPUs/GPUs just because as with more compute around you can run simulations faster/with more accuracy thus allowing faster development/better designs.

Here's a really good article describing why the M1 chip is so fast. Tl;dr it's a beefy CPU with a massive reorder buffer, and a bunch of discrete subsystems (gpu, ml core, dsp, etc).

https://debugger.medium.com/why-is-apples-m1-chip-so-fast-32...

Not to mention that the M1 has a manufacturing node advantage (which can really help with perf-per-watt).

I think people should pay more attention to the LPDDR4X RAM that's tightly coupled to the CPU and likely has significantly less latency and more bandwidth than anything on the Ryzen or i9. This is critical to keeping their wide design fed, and if you swapped this out with standard DDR3200 you'd see some lackluster numbers.

Both Intel and AMD try to overcome the memory wall with larger caches and clever prefetching, which is going to chew up more die space and power than x86 decoders.

Anandtech measured the ram latency at >90ns, which is not great:

https://www.anandtech.com/show/16252/mac-mini-apple-m1-teste...

The cache on the M1 is also massive. If Intel/AMD have clever prefetchers to make up for this, it looks like the M1 might be doing something more.

I have been trying to explain to people that having the DRAM chips physically next to the SOC on the package does not actually meaningfully improve memory latency.

I get that people on this site are excited, but please be excited about the right things.

People seem to have dramatically missed the point here; it's almost certainly done for power reasons.

And also for silicon budget, probably: short distances require small interface transistors and thin wires compared to massive distances like 5cm.

The chip area can be re-used for compute-sized transistors and wires (much, much smaller than interface transistors and wires, so there can be many more of them).

Yeah, speed of PCB transmission is ~8 inches (~20cm) per nanosecond. Which is about 2/3 of the classic "light-nanosecond", which is roughly a foot.

Why would that RAM have less latency? Do you have any sort of a source for why you think that?

How would one benchmark memory performance (DRAM latency & bandwidth) on the various chips?

Above my pay grade! You probably operating with a fixed speed on M1 so you can't intentionally cripple it, but it would be interesting to see "What would this look like if Apple had paired it with standard DDR4-3200?". AMD's Zen core's are known to respond well to lower latency RAM, but in the PC space you're not getting anything close to what Apple has with the LPDDR4x on package. You could try benchmarking the Intel and Ryzen chips with DDR4 5000 and try carefully tuning the memory frequency and timing to find the right balance of bandwidth and latency.

> in the PC space you're not getting anything close to what Apple has with the LPDDR4x on package.

I mean, that's exactly how an 11th Gen Core laptop is constructed.

> but in the PC space you're not getting anything close to what Apple has with the LPDDR4x on package.

You can run basically any Intel CPU at DDR4-4266 without any issue. Or you can go thread ripper and laugh in quad channel memory. Or Intel x299 and triple-channel memory.

You don't have to tune anything, either, the RAM comes pre-tuned with the right timings in the XMP profile.

DDR5 is coming to consumer platforms probably 2022

this is a reasonable test: https://www.cs.virginia.edu/stream/ref.html

but it's pretty straightforward to just copy giant buffers in order/out of order and squint really hard at the results

LPDDR4X-4266 memory and its right on the chip.

I'd really like to see what AMD could do with a huge die that combines 8 Zen 3 cores, 16 GB of LPDDR4X-4266, and their GPU all on a single chip.

I'm very excited about the performance that Apple has been able to generate with this silicon, but these tests don't put anything to bed.

You're giving up extreme choice and expandability for performance by going the M1 route. You can spend $1700 for a Mac Mini with 16 GB of RAM and a 2 TB SSD, but that's what you're stuck with. Forever. Until its time to buy a new computer. People who bought into AMD's AM4 platform at the start were able to go up from the 1000 series to the 3000 series, able to upgrade their RAM from nearly any size to 64 GB, and able to upgrade their SSDs by slotting in a new NVMe drive. To say nothing of the GPU, which for developers of specific solutions, is becoming a serious concern. Also if you game in your spare time, you're at a disadvantage not just due to the Apple ecosystem, but also limited by the GPU.

For most of us, our machines are disposable. Even though I still build myself a new workstation every 2-3 years, I never bother selling it, I just give it away to family because for me its not worth the hassle, and then I order $3-4000 in parts and build a new one all over again. So buying the new Mac Mini made sense for me, although I opted to go with the base model for $699 so I could evaluate it and determine if going "all-in" for a higher-end model made sense (it does), but not for one second am I under the illusion that this chip is going to be the death of x86.

Well, Apple has managed to move all the way down to a 5nm process while Intel still hasn't made it past 14nm. AFAIK that's the largest limiting factor for Intel. I can't speak to why they have been stuck there for so long.

Leaving aside the fact that process size is a marketing term these days, I’m currently typing this on a previous-gen Macbook Air with a 10nm Intel CPU. They’re definitely not stuck on 14nm.

They are effectively stuck on 14nm. They are unable to produce 10nm chips at scale at an acceptable yield, and the power and performance characteristics are not as good as expected either.

There's a reason the only laptops getting 10nm are low-quantity premium laptops.

> Leaving aside the fact that process size is a marketing term these days

There was a youtube video where the guy used a scanning electron microscope to compare gate sizes between 14nm intel and 7nm AMD and both were basically the exact same size.

The conclusion was that the term is useful only to compare a single companies product line against other offerings in that line (eg comparing Intel's 14nm to Intel's 20nm makes sense but comparing Intel to AMD based on node size is meaningless).

I think you are speaking of der8auer and this video in particular: https://youtu.be/1kQUXpZpLXI?t=716

Yes! That’s the one, thanks. It was a very interesting video.

yes but GP is still correct in general if not in the specifics. Practically speaking they can fit way more transistors on the die which translates to more power for more types of things whether it's M1 or 888.

The i9 from the article is a 14nm "tweaked Skylake" part, i.e. the uarch has been on the market for ~five years.

> I can't speak to why they have been stuck there for so long.

Semiconductor manufacturer has been able to use refractive optics (lenses) for decades and decades. The biggest change until now was to immersion lithography as we started getting into UV. Now we're into EUV (extreme UV). Lenses no longer work, everything has to be done with reflective optics (and even then the mirrors get ablated over time). It's the biggest single change in lithography we've seen and Intel still hasn't been able to pull it off in volume.

I’m not sure about 5nm but I know they were targeting 7nm and something broke that set them back till 2022/23. Not looking good for intel

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/intel-announces-delay-to-7...

I think process node is overrated here. If the only thing that Intel was struggling with was process nodes and the rest of their designs were amazing, Apple would have probably stayed with them and encouraged them to outsource their chip fab work.

Apple is getting performance that matches the best of Intel has while beating the power draw of basically all they have.

And it's not just the CPU. The built in GPU of the MBA is surprisingly powerful, and the neural engine is beyond what Intel has.

Yes, Intel needs to get their chip fab back on track, but I also think they have issues with their chip designs (and perhaps something larger with x86).

My intuition is that x86's wasted die space on instruction decoding, backwards compatibility, etc. can be spent on making bigger and wider cores, and this seems to be what M1 is doing.

However, there are still some other aspects to consider. One is Apple's process lead against both Intel and AMD. The next is the memory situation; it'll be interesting to see if increased latency from more conventional configurations will change the dynamics much. (I suspect no, but some people suspect yes.)

It’s not the instruction decoder that wastes die space. In fact, it’s less than 5% of the die (on Skylake).[0]

[0]: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EXFJLebXkAYkXTr?format=jpg&name=...

In case that link dies, it’s from [1] which is linked from [2]

[1]: https://mobile.twitter.com/GPUsAreMagic/status/1256866465577...

[2]: https://travisdowns.github.io/blog/2020/05/26/kreg2.html

> it’s less than 5% of the die

It would be equally fair to say that the same die uses less than 5% of it's space for the integer ALUs. It could also be said that the decode unit is so complex that it takes as much die space as all the integer ports put together.

SRAM may use most of the die, but it isn't using huge amounts of power most of the time as it's static. Those big SIMD units are also powered off when not used (no doubt it's the same with the other ALUs).

In contrast, the entire 5% of the die that makes up the decoder never power gates and is always running flat out. By size it's the same as leaving all your integer cores running full-out all the time.

The bigger issue seems to be that neither AMD nor Intel have been able to make those units much wider over the years which puts a hard limit on total throughput (they've hinted that the power cost on widening the decoder is very big which would mean loads of power used for diminishing returns).

It isn't so much the decoder space, but the decoder complexity that is the disadvantage of x86 chips. The problem is that the instructions have varying lengths. Only when it has decoded an instruction, the chip knows where the next instruction starts. ARM-instructions are all the same length, so the instructions can be decoded in parallel without "knowing" the previous instruction. That lets Apple go much wider (8 instead of 4) with the instruction decoders.

The x86 space for decoding is tiny. The inefficiencies have to come from elsewhere and at least partially from the node difference. An architecturally big one is that x86 only implements SeqCst for atomics whereas looser memory models can allow multi-process programs to be written more efficiently (which they have been already for mobile).

In other words I think the problem has to do with the semantics of x86 more than the syntax of decoding x86.

This was explored in detail in another thread, it seems most of the gains are from looser memory ordering.

I think that Apple "just" [1] picked a very happy place in the parameter space: lower clock means that main memory (which is already lower latency than usual) is "nearer" to the cpu plus a larger L1 with a shorter latency (3 cycles). These (plus probably a larger amount of sustainable outstanding misses) imply that the cpu stalls less which means that they can sustain a larger ILP [2]. A better branch predictor (which is rumored to be best in class, although I haven't seen any in depth analysis) means that they can usefully have a larger reorder buffer and extract even more ILP and memory level parallelism. Finally the large width can take advantage of the extracted parallelism.

The weaker memory model should help extracting additional memory level parallelism, but I doubt that ordering has large impact. M1 is quite good even when running in TSO mode.

[1] of course they need to be commended for this, they went against the usual wisdom, probably because their CPU was designed to be low power first then high performance, not the other way around.

[2] typically the average ILP for normal applications is 1.5 instructions per cycle, but the variance is high, so if you reduce the amount of cycles the cpu is stalled, the ILP can go up fast.

I agree with the rest, but memory latency is actually pretty poor on the M1:

https://www.anandtech.com/show/16252/mac-mini-apple-m1-teste...

You’re right. Like I said, atomics are one space. Another as you point out is that the memory architecture is pretty unique at providing high throughout and lower latency than traditional x86 architectures. I suspect Intel and AMD will adjust their roadmaps accordingly as a result of this new competition.

Where does the low-latency claim come from? Benchmarks do not validate it, giving main memory latency of around 100 ns.

Apparently you are right, but because of the lower clock, main memory is still closer in cycles. It would also be interesting to know the amount of outstanding main memory references.

By the way, does someone knows where RISC-V stands regarding this ?

Yes I agree, it's more the semantics and the legacy of x86 (page sizes, MMU, memory models - even though Rosetta still runs faster than x86) than simply decoding.