Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by karpodiem 2051 days ago
Surely they have different clock rates, but Apple isn't referencing clock rates in their marketing material for Macs with M1 chips.
1 comments

Yeah I am surprised more people are ignoring this. If the two computer models have identical chips, then why does Apple even bother putting a fan in the pro?

To me the fact that the Air is fanless and the pro has a fan would indicate to me that they have different clock rates on the high end. I am sure the Air is capped lower than the Pro in order to make sure it doesn't overheat. It is probably a firmware lock, and the hardware is identical. But once we do benchmarks I would expect that the pro outperforms the air by a good margin. They added a fan in the pro so that it can reach higher speeds.

Surely the Air is capped so that users don't ruin their computers by running a process that overheats the computer.

But of course Apple doesn't want to reveal clock speeds. The best they can give us is "5x faster than the best selling PC in its class". What does that mean? The $250 computer at Walmart that sells like hotcakes for elementary age kids that need a zoom computer or the Lenovo Thinkpad Pro that business buy by the pallet? Who the hell knows.

They said in the presentation for sustained workloads. I get the impression they're the same peak clock speed but the air throttles faster.
The fan is only there for sustained loads. They all have identical chips (aside from the 7 core gpu option Air). They all hit the same pstates and then throttle accordingly due to temperature.

The MBP and Mini are there for people who want maximum sustained performance.