Apple M1 crushes Intel – benchmark results

[Emanuel]

My initial doubts confirmed.

(besides, confirmed by Max @MaxYuryev on his heads-up too)

https://www.theverge.com/2020/11/10/21559228/apple-new-macbook-air-pro-difference-arm-m1-fan-thermal-performance

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Product_binning#Semiconductor_manufacturing

https://www.macworld.co.uk/news/2020-macbook-air-problems-3788127/

 

Forget the Air, buy the Mini instead if you are on budget.

- E.

[zerocool22]

I have a ryzen 1700x, gtx 1080 and 16gb ddr4 ram with some ssd disks. I edit mostly on davinci resolve. 

Does the m1 outperform my build. Never had any problems with prores or braw. But now these new dslrs all shoot h265, and I own a s5(havent edited any s5 footage yet?

 

And should I replace my ryzen build with the mac mini m1 for video editing?

 

Thanks

[Emanuel]

Well, as seems so:

 

And... they say Intel encoders offer higher IQ in the end : )

 

On the other hand:

 

 

[zerocool22]

33 minutes ago, Emanuel said:

Well, as seems so:

 

 

 

 

 

Hmm maybe I am reading it wrongly but it looks like the ryzen is whooping the m1's butt by quite a margin. 

[Emanuel]

25 minutes ago, zerocool22 said:

Hmm maybe I am reading it wrongly but it looks like the ryzen is whooping the m1's butt by quite a margin. 

LOL Indeed, there's not a single answer to take : )

Getting a machine for editing/grading/post-production depends a lot on software optimization and distinct parts of the hardware resources required to handle much different tasks :- )

Some of them work just fine and... anyhow awkwardly some under circumstances too, in fact.

 

I am now buying a couple of units of the ASUS Zenfone 7 Pro for 3D UHD capture at 120fps... go figure!

ASUS staff can only think I am crazy (I guess they actually do!) and my partner in crime who has already worked as Peter Greenaway stereographer in the past, other than supervising Godard's stuff, as for instance, is puzzled with my decision, so... What can I tell you more sideways? ; )

 

Those guys on that YT channel up there look like to know their job fairly enough (as well, the fella Max), I find their views honestly interesting on topic BTW:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCnMf3jl6DDzvPrm5RToktuA

 

[Andrew Reid]

The M1 has more transistors than Emanuel has YouTube videos in one thread

[Andrew Reid]

M1 goes back to the ARM1 in 1985 which is a chip I brushed shoulders with as a young kid familiar with the Acorn / BBC Micro computers at the time (and in the early 90's) in British schools. RISC architecture was showing some serious strengths way back then.

When you take Moore's law and many years of Apple investment in efficient mobile silicon you get this...

An actual 64bit CPU core occupies a tiny part of the die, and the integrated GPU about one quarter. The DRAM is pretty much on the same die and is accessed extremely effectively by both CPU and GPU.

I took delivery of the MacBook Air M1 last week, from Amazon for £999...

It is an ultra thin / featherweight class affordable consumer laptop.

With a motherboard the size of a small TV remote control

And probably only a little larger than what's in the iPad Pro.

So I booted it up and put something very intensive and demanding on...

Top-end PC game designed for Nvidia RTX cards and Intel CPUs.

It runs via Steam, via an interpreter (Rosetta 2). Not even a native app.

First signs this is not a normal fanless ultra thin laptop is I easily get 60fps with good looking graphics, nothing turned down all the way. The resolution looks so good, as if there's either upscaling, some A.I involved or some new kind of display scaling magic going on. Yet this is with the performance hit of Rosetta (about 20%), on a PC game port running x86 code with integrated graphics!!

It smashes... demolishes... everything else in the same class.

Intel, Nvidia and AMD should be extremely worried.

When / if Apple scale up this architecture to 32 core high-end consumer territory with a fan and dedicated Apple GPU, the rest are in trouble.

There is so much custom silicon in the CPU... video editing, encoding, image editing, all buttery smooth so far and this is the least powerful Apple silicon machine they will ever make.

[Emanuel]

How have you found their heat dissipation performance for intensive post-production work if any? Prepping any article to come up soon? : )

That 32-core realm is rumored so, yes, that will definitely be something. Even though I find already that Mini M1 16GB under $1000 unique of a kind. They say it beats much more RAM hunger workhorses.

[Andrew Reid]

Only just got it and not done enough to test it yet. Everything feels solid and snappy so far. Got Resolve 17.1 beta on there. And LumaFusion iOS app runs natively in MacOS on it. Interesting to try that with a mouse and keyboard.

I am sure there will be throttling. No fan. Not even a vent. But it's like complaining the car you use to do the supermarket run is only coming 12th in F1 qualifying rather than pole position. Shouldn't even be talking about high-end video tasks on this class of laptop 🙂

 

[filmmakereu]

This shines only with the new R5 10bit 422 codec:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KKwG0zSJRjw

 

[ntblowz]

Has anyone who had m1 got out of memory error?

 

 

[zerocool22]

I will wait on a amd ryzen equivalent or improvement. 

[Amazeballs]

1 hour ago, zerocool22 said:

I will wait on a amd ryzen equivalent or improvement. 

You will have to wait until they make an ARM chip I guess. Right now in terms of chip effectiveness and power per wat Apple is unreachable. I am talking about CPU&GPU. I prefer to wait until MBP 16 with M1X or whatever it might be called. 

[zerocool22]

10 minutes ago, Amazeballs said:

You will have to wait until they make an ARM chip I guess. Right now in terms of chip effectiveness and power per wat Apple is unreachable. I am talking about CPU&GPU. I prefer to wait until MBP 16 with M1X or whatever it might be called. 

AMD announced they are working on it. So I guess we will have a cheaper and better alternative in the end of 2021.

[Amazeballs]

13 minutes ago, zerocool22 said:

AMD announced they are working on it. So I guess we will have a cheaper and better alternative in the end of 2021.

Not sure about that pal. Apple has been working on their A chips - for more than a DECADE now. And they even had Jim Keller (who is probably the most talented CPU developer of the era) who both co-developed A4 for Apple and Zen for AMD. Apple have been ironing out their A series processors for such a long time and M1 is just a modification of A14 Bionic. So I have serious doubts that AMD will be able to catch up SO FAST as by the end of this year. And don't forget that we also have NVIDIA who bought ARM and they for sure want to enter the game as well. So ARM will ofc come to a Windows world but defiantly not as fast as all of us want that to happen. 

[zerocool22]

3 minutes ago, Amazeballs said:

Not sure about that pal. Apple has been working on their A chips - for more than a DECADE now. And they even had Jim Keller (who is probably the most talented CPU developer of the era) who both co-developed A4 for Apple and Zen for AMD. Apple have been ironing out their A series processors for such a long time and M1 is just a modification of A14 Bionic. So I have serious doubts that AMD will be able to catch up SO FAST as by the end of this year. And don't forget that we also have NVIDIA who bought ARM and they for sure want to enter the game as well. So ARM will ofc come to a Windows world but defiantly not as fast as all of us want that to happen. 

[Amazeballs]

well.. I hope this leak is true and you are right. I will be very happy about that for sure. 

[Amazeballs]

Another interesting fact  - M1 graphics is mostly on par with NVIDIA 1650 mobile. Maybe a tiny bit behind. BUT 1650 - is 50 Wat average power consumption. And M1 is 13 Watt WITH THE CPU. 

Apple M1 single core CPU performance is around 1750 in Geekbench, AMD 5800H - 1500. Yes AMD has more cores, but Apple should at least double their performance cores in M1X. And same goes for GPU cores. Double the 1650 performance is about GTX1070 level. Now imagine 1070 plus most powerful CPU in a notebook and all in 35 watt package? Sounds pretty hardcore for me. Poor Intel. And Apple still has the power envelope to add more GPU or CPU cores if they wish. They can make M1X 50 watt if the want no problem.

[Amazeballs]

Also shared memory between CPU and GPU is another potentially huge thing. Imagine having 32 or even 64 gigs with such a system. You usually don't need a lot of RAM for video editing and Apple is quite efficient with memory management. So GPU could be feeded with lots and lots of memory. Cheaper and more effective. 

[Andrew Reid]

So it's clear RISC / ARM architecture is going to be where the next-gen CPUs are, goodbye x86.

Would we like to place bets on who will come out top in next-gen CPUs...

• NVidia
• Qualcomm
• Intel
• AMD
• Apple
• Microsoft
• Samsung
• Huawei
• Other

Going only off what we know now, for me it has to be Apple due to the best chip designers and most experience with the architecture. Also their sheer competence has been market leading for a long time over Qualcomm. The benchmarks for the latest iPhone and iPad show this to be true.

Not only this but Apple have the most optimised OS for ARM. Windows will never be as well optimised or integrated with the range of upcoming ARM next-gen CPUs/GPUs, because it just can't be... it has to support so many different chip configurations and legacy software architectures like DirectX.

Samsung will enter the game with a supercharged Exynos chip. Huawei are already quite competitive with Kirin but have issues now due to the US blacklist, that could set them back a few years.

Nvidia - well Tegra was always pretty good, I have no doubt they can offer Apple some serious competition especially on the GPU side.

Qualcomm - plenty of experience but around 8 years now being beat by Apple. Doesn't look great, does it.

Microsoft - no. They will just outsource everything and not bother with proper vertical integration. Windows won't be very optimised, even for their own processors. SQ1 effort shows this to be the case. A ton of catching up to do.

Finally AMD and Intel - I rate AMD more highly, but I think both of them have too much investment in x86 architecture holding them back and splitting their focus. Windows will inevitably further slow down whatever they come up with vs Apple. I really cannot see Apple being beaten. MacBook Pro 16" with M1X or M2 may be one of the most future proof buys you will ever make. I am going to jump at it when it comes out.