| >You can't do what you do on a desktop on a laptop, not even a good one Yeah… no, those days are over. The reviews clearly show the M1 Macs, including the MacBook Pro outperform most "desktops" at graphics-intensive tasks. >So no, M1 is not comparable to a Threadripper, it's not even close, even if it consumes a lot more energy Um… nobody is comparing an M1 Mac to a processor that often costs more than either the M1 Mac mini or MacBook Pro. However, the general consensus is the M1 outperforms PCs with mid to high-end GPUs and CPUs from Intel and AMD. Threadripper is a high-end, purpose build chip that can cost more than complete systems from most other companies, including Apple. However, it's at a cost of power consumption, special cooling in some cases, etc. >Who cares if an M1 consumes less energy than a candle if I can buy 64GB of DDR4 3600 for 250 bucks and render the VFX for a 2 hours movie in 4k. Another 300 bucks buy me a second GPU The MacBook Pro has faster LPDDR4X-4266 RAM on a 128-bit wide memory bus. The memory bandwidth maxes out at over 60 GB/s. And because the RAM, CPU and GPU (and all of the other units in the SoC) are all in the same die, memory is extremely fast. From AnandTech; emphasis mine [1]:
"A single Firestorm achieves memory reads up to around 58GB/s, with memory writes coming in at 33-36GB/s. Most importantly, memory copies land in at 60 to 62GB/s depending if you’re using scalar or vector instructions. The fact that a single Firestorm core can almost saturate the memory controllers is astounding and something we’ve never seen in a design before." It can easily render a 2-hour 4k video unplugged in the background while you're doing other stuff. And when you're done, you’ll still have enough battery to last you until the next day if necessary. According to the AnandTech review [1], it blows away all other integrated GPUs and is even faster than several dedicated GPUs. That's not nothing; and these machines do it for less money. >vertical products are an absolute waste of money when you chase the last bit of performance to save time (for you and your clients) and don't have the budget of Elon Musk >The M1 changes nothing in that space This is not correct… seeing should be believing. Here's a video of 4k, 6k and 8k RED RAW files being rendered on an M1 Mac with 8 Gb of RAM, using DaVinci Resolve 17 [2]. Spoiler: while the 8k RAW file stuttered a little, once the preview resolution was reduced to only 4k, the playback was smooooth. [1]: https://www.anandtech.com/show/16252/mac-mini-apple-m1-teste... [2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HxH3RabNWfE |
Don't get me wrong - this is still very impressive with a ~20w combined! power draw under full load, but it definitely doesn't beat mid - high desktop GPUs.
(This is largely irrelevant for video encoding/decoding though as you can see - as that's mostly done either on the CPU or dedicated silicon living in either the CPU or the GPU that's separate from the main graphics processing cores.)
[0] https://www.macrumors.com/2020/11/16/m1-beats-geforce-gtx-10...