Is that really true? I don't have any intricate chip knowledge, but it rings false. Whether ARM is coming from a phone background or the Xeon from a server background, what matters in the end is the actual chip used. Maybe phone-derived chips even have an advantage because they are designed to conserve power whereas server chips are designed to harvest every little ounce of performance. IDK a lot about power states in server chips, but it would make sense if they aren't as adapted to rapidly step down power use as a phone chip.
Now, you might be happy with a hot leaf-blower and that's fine. But I would say the market is elsewhere: silent, long-running, light notebooks that can throw around performance if need be, you strike me as an outlier.
Pro laptops should have a beefy CPU, great screen, really fast SSD, long battery life, lots of RAM which (presumably) your notebook features, but the new M somethings seemingly as well. But in the end, people buy laptops so they can use them on their lap occasionally. And I know my HP is getting uncomfy hot, the same was said about the intel laptops from Apple I think.
Apple doesn't need to have the one fastest laptop out there, they need a credible claim to punching in the upper performance echelon - and I think with their M* family, they are there.
>Apple doesn't need to have the one fastest laptop out there
correct. My complaint, which I have reiterated about 50 times to shiny iphone idiots on here who don't do any real number crunching for work, is when the industry calls "mid tier" something that apple calls "pro" - apple is deceiving the consumer with marketing. The new laptops are a competition to Dell's Latitude and XPS lines. Not their pro lines. Those pro laptops weigh 7lb, and have a huge, loud fan exhaust on the back so they can clock at 5GHz for an hour. They have 128GB of RAM - ECC RAM, because if you have that much RAM w/o ECC, you have a high chance of bit errors.
There are many things you can do to speed up your stuff, if you waste electricity. The issue is not that apple doesn't make a good laptop. It's that they're lying to the consumer. As always. Do you remember when they marketed their acrylic little cube mini-desktop? It was "a supercomputer." They do this as a permanent tactic - sell overpriced underperforming things, and lie with marketing. Like using industry standard terms to describe things not up to that standard.
Relax, no one is forcing you to use Apple products.
Also, there is a TON of pro Mac users. If we define ’pro’ as getting paid for work done on Macs..
Not to mention M1 emulates x86 pretty darn well..
Personally, I think software engineers don’t need fast laptops either. We need mainframes and fast local networks. Nothing beats compiling at the speed of 192 cores at once.
Which reminds me, laptops and render farms is exactly the technique those hipster graphic designers you talked about are using so they aren’t missing out on any power.
which is the top of their salary ceiling, and it's not a high number, like at all. the top number for software devs is about 700k. In my field, people make 200k+. But we're not talking about "pro" people. We're talking about a "pro" laptop. It's the best thing that apple makes - that doesn't make it "pro." It's got the performance of the midrange systems from everyone else.
>I think software engineers don’t need fast laptops either. yeah, when I run a script to read a few gig of performance data and do a bunch of calculations on it, I need a fast laptop. Until that's done, I'm sitting there, CPU maxed out, not able to do anything else. With an M1, I have to arrange my schedule to process the dataset overnight. With a Dell I run it over lunch. Case closed.
>We need mainframes and fast local networks. Nothing beats compiling at the speed of 192 cores at once.
I'm not a software engineer anymore. When I was, no, I did not usually compile on the server. I compiled on my workstation. Because you're not on a fast local network. You're at an airport for 4 hours, or on a plane for 5 hours, or on a comcast connection at your house.
What is it doing when it runs x86_64 binaries then?
The thing is, the corporate DELL windows machines available were largely unsuitable to dev work due to the trashy interfaces (low resolution screens, bad trackpads, battery life so bad you can’t make it through a 2 hour meeting undocked). The Windows laptops available really failed hard when they needed to be laptops.
Probably not faster than an M1 Pro and definitely not faster than the M1 Max.
Your machine doesn't have a 512-bit wide memory interface running at over 400GB/s.
Does the Xeon processor in your laptop have 192KB of instruction cache and 24MB of L2 cache?
Every ARM instruction is the same size, enabling many instructions to be in flight all at once, unlike the x86-64 architecture where instructions vary in size and you can't have nearly as many instructions in flight at once.
Apples-to-apple: at the same chip frequency, an M1 has higher throughput than a Xeon and most any other x86 chip. This is basic RISC vs. CISC stuff that's been true forever. It's especially true now as increases in clock speeds has dramatically slowed and the only way to get significantly more performance is by adding more cores.
On just raw performance, I'd take the 8 high-performance cores in an M1 Pro vs. the 6 cores in your Xeon any day of the week and twice on Sunday.
And of course, when it comes to performance per watt, there's no comparison and that's really the story here.
Now, this is a new version of the M1, but it's an incremental 1-year improvement.
If you read AnandTech [1] on this, you'll see this is not the case—there have been huge jumps in several areas.
Incremental would have resulted in the same memory bandwidth with faster cores. And 6 high-performance cores vs. the 4 in the original M1.
Except Apple didn't do that—they doubled the number to 8 high-performance cores and doubled the memory width, etc. There were 8 GPU cores on the original M1 and how you can get up to 32!
Apple stated the Pro and the Max have 1.7x of the CPU performance of Intel's 8-core Core i7-11800H with 70% lower power consumption. There's nothing incremental about that.
By ditching Intel, what apple did is making sure their pro line - which is about power, not mobility, is no longer a competitor, and never will be.
Pro can mean different things to different people. For professional content creators, these new laptops are super professional. Someone could take off from NYC and fly all the way to LA while working on 16-inch MacBook Pro with a 120 MHz mini LED 7.7 million pixel screen that can display a billion colors in 4k or 8k video—battery only.
If you were on the same flight working on the same content, you'd be out of power long before you crossed the Mississippi while the Mac guy is still working. At half the weight of your laptop but a dramatically better display and performance when it comes to video editing and rendering multiple streams of HDR video.
The 16-inch model has 21 hours of video playback which probably comes in handy in many use cases.
Here's a video of a person using the first generation, 8 GB RAM M1 Mac to edit 8K video; the new machines are much more capable: https://youtu.be/HxH3RabNWfE.
[1]: https://www.anandtech.com/show/17019/apple-announced-m1-pro-...
They are way more efficient as server cores. https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/graviton/
Have you noticed almost no one uses ARM? There's a reason for that. Including software being licensed per core, so faster hotter cores and fewer of them win.
Xeons are not magically faster than their i7/i9 counterparts (mine being not faster than a i7-7820HQ which is its contemporary flagship high performance mobile CPU). In fact they can be slower because the emphasis is on correctness and multi core, not usually single thread performance.
Xeons are also slower than a modern AMD chip which also can have more cores.
5x is a performance metric that doesn’t match up. Unless you have a desktop class 145w/165w cpu, in which case it’s not going to get 9hrs of battery unless you’re not actually touching the CPU. More like 30 minutes of heavy use on the largest battery legally allowed in laptops.
Edit: I just took a quick snoop on geek bench and found a modern xeon w in the largest dell precision laptop available:
Single core: 929 vs 1783 for M1
Multi core: 6718 vs 12693 for M1
https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/10517773
Synthetic scores aren’t everything, but I’m hard pressed seeing how you can get 5x performance out of a chip that scores almost exactly half. Even with hardware accelerations like AVX512 (which causes a cpu to get so hot it throttles below baseline even on servers with more than adequate cooling.)
M1 does not. Code compile is about as fast. Battery lasts a 3 day business trip or a hackaton without charging. I never heard its fan. I dont care much about brands, but lightweight, fast enough and well built M1 is praiseworthy. I am not getting the pro or max, as the benefits for me as a software dev are probably not worth the extra weight and power consumption.
All other things being equal: your statement is simply not true.
I just checked and I can’t find a mobile Xeon with a greater TDP than 45w, so you’re stuck with that geek bench score because that’s essentially as good as it gets for a modern mobile Xeon.
Xeons, fwiw, are just higher binned i7s and i9s with features still enabled. The reason they can be slower than i7s and i9s is that the memory controller has to do more work and the way Intel does multi-core (essentially a ring bus) doesn’t scale gracefully always.
In summary, you are full of crap if you think an untuned blind geekbench score is what you're going by - an aggregation of a whole bunch of tests, using defaults. My statement is true, as I kick off the same data processing script on my laptop and it finishes it over lunch, while my coworker kicks it off overnight.
> Xeon with a greater TDP than 45w
yes, the Xeon W-11955M in the Dell is 45W. Now add the RTX GPU - which coincidentally will be doing most of the work. Unless you're running the geekbench test you're referring to, to purposely gimp the results. That Intel integrated graphics chip uses almost no power.
go process a large dataset and do some calculations on it. Run a bunch of VMs while you're doing it to - let's say 3. Give each one 32G of memory. Better be ECC memory too, or your data won't be reliable. Maybe in about 5 years when apple catches up to the current pro laptops, you'll be able to. This is why all the m1 comparisons they do is to previous generation intel chips in their old laptops. which have always been slow. apple has always used outdated hardware, in everything they've ever made.
Your laptop is definitely very capable. But it’s barely a laptop. Why not build out a proper desktop? This precision would be a pain in the ass to carry around for most people, especially travel. Dell made sacrifices to get that kind of power: size, cooling, and battery life. Those are actually meaningful things when it comes to a laptop for most people, even pros.
I think the fact that you’re even mentioning a MacBook <em>air</em> in the same sentence is very good for the Air. The M1 hasn’t really been marketed to the pro market until the recent release.
Also, 5x faster at what? The M1 is about the same performance as a W-11855M at single core cinebench, and only 25% slower at multicore. So comparison to the M1 pro/max is not very promising for the Xeon chip.
Even at 8k$ the laptop is often below 5% of the budget.
You're literally here saying the M1 is going to replace a server chip. Newsflash - the M1 doesn't even run any of the needed code, because it's arm code - a small niche.
Seriously though, your comment lacks, because of your very narrow and specific definition of „pro“.
The vast majority of people using laptops professionally, obviously prefer a MacBook Pro over a niche Dell laptop with a Xeon CPU.
Also the Geekbench score for Xeon CPUs used in Dell Precision laptops is way below that of the M1 Pro.
Post your part number and the model number of your ram.
Anything less and you’re trolling.
It is common for Dell Precisions to ship with Xeons and not ECC ram.
https://www.servethehome.com/dell-precision-7540-with-intel-...
in fact, i'm not sure you can even order a xeon precision w/o ecc ram. but i'm not here to do your research for you for things you can look up in a minute. you're the one that claimed a xeon precision doesn't come w/ ecc ram, without even googling it.
my laptop is a 7660. I also have an i7 5560, and a latitude 7410 w/ an I7. It's what work gives me for work - and yes, I use all 3 since we went full remote. For "pro" work. The M1 laptop is comparable to my 7410 - which I use to play online games and chromecast videos. Not any real work. It's a kids toy compared to my 7660.
since you seem to be lost here on this tech site, instead of hanging out on reddit with your peers: all xeon CPUs support ECC ram. If you want you can go on ebay, buy ECC ram, and put it in any Xeon system. Or, you know, just order it w/ ECC ram from Dell.
>It is common for Dell Precisions to ship with Xeons and not ECC ram.
correct. because most come with 16 or 32GB or RAM, and are the low end of Dell's pro line. Once you get a lot of RAM, like 64 or 128GB, and you're crunching numbers and running VMs, your chances of a memory error go up dramatically. Which is why you need ECC RAM. Which has zero to do with your post that I was replying to, claiming precisions don't have ecc ram. now find me an m1 laptop with 128GB of ECC RAM. Because you're right - "Enough" strawman astroturfing from you.
The M1 is a Latitude competitor - not a Precision competitor. Apple's "pro" line is considered mid-tier from other vendors. Their tests showing it beats xeons are comparing xeons released 2 years ago, that for some reason they used in their apple laptops. Because Apple has always used outdated CPUs compared to everyone else.
This kind of behavior makes you seem much more lost here on HN than the guy you're replying to. And looking at your downvoted and flagged posts all over the place, HN seems to agree.
My precision did not ship with ECC ram.
ECC also needs to be supported by the motherboard; all AMD Ryzen chips have ECC enabled but due to limited motherboard support: many are not able to effectively use ECC.
If you have the time could you share the output of `sudo dmidecode —type 17`?
That laptop (much heavier and much much more power hungry) still doesn’t beat an M1 at Dells max configuration, it certainly doesn’t beat it 5x over.
For the Xeon W-11955M
1618 Single-Core Score
9266 Multi-Core Score
For the M1 Max
1770 Single-Core Score
12556 Multi-Core Score
Very unlikely. You seem to go out of your way not to mention the Xeon's part number. So what Xeon is it?
With a GeekBench score of 1647 ST/9650 MT, this $5377.88 machine is just a bit faster than the passively cooled $999 MacBook Air with 1744 ST/7600 MT. The MacBook Pro 14" 10 core is better than the Dell Xeon in about every way, performance, price, performance per watt, etc.
I run about 50k worth of software licenses on the laptop and generate millions in revenue per quarter with it. That's why it's a pro laptop, and I'm sure my company paid about double your number after you add in dell's pro support plus. Pro laptop for pro work. You're a kid who wants toys, but wants to say you're using professional equipment. I got something that's like the pro mac laptop. work gave that to me too for secondary tasks. it's called a dell latitude. it runs the latest i7 and no ecc memory. great for chromecasting porn and playing games in the browser, 13 hours of battery unlike the precision's 9, and much lighter. they just don't call it a pro.
But here I am, with a pretty thin and very durable laptop that has a 6 core Xeon in it. It gets hot, it has huge fans, and it completely obliterates any M1 laptop. I don't mean it's twice as fast. I mean things run at 5x or faster vs an M1.
Now, this is a new version of the M1, but it's an incremental 1-year improvement. It'll be very slightly faster than the old gen. By ditching Intel, what apple did is making sure their pro line - which is about power, not mobility, is no longer a competitor, and never will be. Because when you want a super fast chip, you don't design up from a freaking cell phone CPU. You design down from a server CPU. You know, to get actual work done, professionally. But yeah, I do see their pro battery is 11 hours while mine usually dies at 9. Interesting how I got my computer plugged in most of the time though...