[smoldesu]

CPUs are a chump's game, and it's no surprise that Apple, the company with sole access to next-generation silicon, was able to reach last-generation performance on a laptop chip. Nobody freaked out when AMD's Ryzen 7 4800u hit 4ghz over 8 cores, I don't see a reason why I should freak out now when Apple's doing it with 10 less watts.

Plus, that's only the CPU side of things. The M1's GPU is annihilated by most GPUs in it's class... from 2014. Fast forwards to 2021, and it's graphics performance is honestly pathetic. Remember our friend the 4800u? It's integrated GPU is able to beat the M1's GPU in raw benchmarks, and it came out 18 months before it.

So yeah, I think there are a lot of workloads where the M1 is a pretty crappy CPU. Unless your workload is CPU-bound, there's not really much of a reason to own one. And even still, the M1 doesn't guarantee compatibility with legacy software. It doesn't have a functional hypervisor, and it has lower IO bandwidth than most CPUs from a decade ago. Not really something I'd consider viable as a "daily driver", at least for my workload.

[krunkcoin]

"CPUs are a chump's game" - what? High performance CPUs which nevertheless use very little power are extremely difficult to design.

"AMD's Ryzen 7 4800u hit 4ghz over 8 cores" - It doesn't. AMD specifies it as having 1.8 GHz base clock, 4.2 GHz max boost clock. AMD's cores use ~15W each at max frequency. Since the 4800U's configurable TDP range is 10W to 25W for the whole chip, there is no way that all 8 cores run at 4.2 GHz simultaneously for any substantial period of time. In fact, running even one core in its max performance state probably isn't sustainable in a lot of systems which opt to use the 4800U's default 15W TDP configuration.

On the other side of things, Apple M1 performance cores use ~6W each at max frequency. It is actually possible for all four to run at full performance indefinitely with the whole chip using about 25W, provided there is little GPU load.

"Remember our friend the 4800u? It's integrated GPU is able to beat the M1's GPU in raw benchmarks, and it came out 18 months before it." - Say what? The only direct comparison I've been able to find is 4700U vs M1, in Anandtech's M1 article, and it shows the M1 GPU as 2.6x faster in GFXBench 5.0 Aztec Ruins 1080p offscreen and 2.5x faster in 1440p high.

Granted, the 4700U GPU is a bit slower than the 4800U GPU, but not by a factor of 2 or more.

This isn't an unexpected result given that M1's GPU offers ~2.6 single precision TFLOPs while the 4800's is ~1.8 TFLOPs.

Literally everything you wrote about M1 being bad is wrongheaded in the extreme, LOL.

[breakfastduck]

Not being viable as your daily driver does not make it crappy.

But you heard it here first guys, building CPUs is a chumps game. And you see no reason to celebrate the first genuinely viable, power-efficient and fast non x86 CPU being a mass success. Fine I guess, but I don't agree.

Also not sure why you wave away CPU bound workloads as though they don't exist or somehow lesser.

[smoldesu]

> Not being viable as your daily driver does not make it crappy.

What does it make it then? Some unicorn device that I'm unworthy of? Is there something wrong with my workload, or Apple's? Apple is marketing the M1 to computer users. I'm a computer user, and I cannot use it as part of my workflow, I have every right to voice that concern to Apple.

> And you see no reason to celebrate the first genuinely viable, power-efficient and fast non x86 CPU being a mass success.

You must be late to the party, ARM has been around for years. Apple's power efficiency is about on-par with what should be expected from a 5nm ARM chip with a gimped GPU. What is there to celebrate, that Apple had the initiative to buy out the entirety of the 5nm node at TSCM, plunging the entire world into a semiconductor shortage unlike anything ever seen before? Yeah, great job Apple. I think it was worth disrupting the global economy so you could ship your supercharged Raspberry Pi /s

> Also not sure why you wave away CPU bound workloads as though they don't exist or somehow lesser.

CPU-bound workloads absolutely exist, but who's running them on a Mac? Hell, more importantly, who's running them on ARM? x86 still has a better value proposition than ARM in the datacenter/server market, and most local workloads are hardware-accelerated these days. I really don't know what to tell you.

[breakfastduck]

Audio production is almost entirely CPU bound, to give one example.

Who's running them on ARM? Not many now, but everything starts somewhere.

It's called progress. You say it's 'to be expected' - well no one else has done it, have they?