Re:MacBook Pro M1X benchmarks have leaked
by sudosysgen on Tuesday February 23, 2021 @01:24AM
(#26234362)
The low performance cores of the M1 go anywhere from useless to actively harmful in critical multi thread workloads.
When you are doing serious work, the M1 is really a four core CPU and nothing else.
M1 cores have higher IPC, yes. They are also bigger and slower. Larger reorder buffers and more flexible memory models mean bigger cores which mean slower clock speeds at the same power consumption.
The M1 also doesn't have SMT, which is an easy +20% IPC.
If you measure the performance per core and the power consumption per core, and of course I'm talking only high performance cores, then last gen x86 laptop CPUs are right there despite higher performance.
That's not what the benchmarks I see say. AMD's chips with 8 amd64 cores beat the M1, which has 4 big cores and 4 low-power ones. In some benchmarks, the x86 laptop CPUs record higher performance, but at a higher clock and with a higher TDP. I don't have the IPC numbers for either, but with a lot of execution ports, its huge reorder buffer and the less strict memory consistency model, I suspect the IPC to be higher on the M1.