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by fifafu 1239 days ago
that's just not true. Take any of the last Macbook Pro Intel (maxed out) models and compare it to a similarly priced M1 Max. The difference in real world usage is night and day - although a lot of it is caused by the horrible thermal throttling, that made the Intel models almost unusable. It was definitely the biggest performance boost I have ever seen going from one generation to the next.

Example: On the last Intel MBP I could barely run Teams with video, the Intel Macbooks (I tried many) got immediately super hot and started throttling to a point that made the machines unusable. The M1 Max doesn't even turn on the fan.
1 comments
Maursault 1239 days ago
> Take any of the last Macbook Pro Intel (maxed out) models and compare it to a similarly priced M1 Max.

What you have done is leap frog a couple generations there. Compare the benchmarks[0] of one model of the last Intel MBP, say the 2019 13" MBP (MacBookPro15,4) and the very next generation of that model, the 13" 2020 M1 MBP (MacBookPro17,1) and you will see it is an incremental increase in performance, a 36% performance increase in single core and a 40% increase in multicore performance. Impressive, but these are not exponential gains in performance nor even a doubling of performance, like what everyone seems to expect between the benchmarks of M1 and M2, and in fact this foolishness is not new, and has been going on since 68k models were new, all through the PPC era, into the Intel era up to today.

[0] https://browser.geekbench.com/macs/macbook-pro-13-inch-retin...

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fifafu 1239 days ago
I'm talking about this 1 generation jump (the 13" models have usually been limited in multi-core options, only now with the introduction of the 14" MBP they offer the exact same options as the 16"):

https://browser.geekbench.com/macs/macbook-pro-16-inch-late-...

https://browser.geekbench.com/macs/macbook-pro-16-inch-2021-...

And the real world usage implication feel even more crazy than the numbers look like.

Also, even the one you linked looks crazy. Almost 40% increase - when did you ever get something like this in a year to year upgrade?

Additionally these benchmarks don't really tell about the thermal throttling problems the Intel machines had, which are completely gone with Apple Silicon. So all in all I'd definitely not call the Apple Silicon jump incremental - for the Apple hardware it was revolutionary.

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