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AltecX

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Oct 28, 2016
550
1,391
Philly
Has anyone been albe to post/find any real workload tests or have we only found synthetics?

Personally I'm waiting till I see real world Photoshop and office workloads tested before I make a decision on a purchase.
 
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deeddawg

macrumors G5
Jun 14, 2010
12,467
6,570
US
My guess is it'll be another couple or few days, then the review embargo will be lifted and we should see some info.
 

AltecX

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Oct 28, 2016
550
1,391
Philly
My guess is it'll be another couple or few days, then the review embargo will be lifted and we should see some info.
You'd think someone would tease something or that the embargo would lift before the order banks open to help promote more orders.
 

deeddawg

macrumors G5
Jun 14, 2010
12,467
6,570
US
Do you think tech YouTubers & such have these Macs yet?
I'd expect so, at least for those with sufficient followings as to incline Apple to send review units out to them.

Be aware that I'm speculating and could very easily be wrong. :p
 

Lord Hamsa

macrumors 6502a
Jul 16, 2013
698
675
Has anyone been albe to post/find any real workload tests or have we only found synthetics?

Personally I'm waiting till I see real world Photoshop and office workloads tested before I make a decision on a purchase.
For the raw number crunchiness aspect of it, I'd like to see some Handbrake encoding comparisons.
 
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dmccloud

macrumors 68040
Sep 7, 2009
3,138
1,899
Anchorage, AK
Has anyone been albe to post/find any real workload tests or have we only found synthetics?

Personally I'm waiting till I see real world Photoshop and office workloads tested before I make a decision on a purchase.

Photoshop benchmarks will be hampered until the new version for the M1 is released in early 2021. The current version does run on the DTK, although some of the plugins act a bit strange.
 

IvanKaramazov

macrumors member
Jul 23, 2020
32
49
We have various peeks into real-world performance, though it very much depends on what you're looking for.

Geekbench is not real world, but it's worth noting that there's enough submissions now for the Mac listings to have an averaged listing for the MBP. It looks good. It's Geekbench, so apply your personal biases accordingly.

The head of Affinity Photo has an M1 Mac (not clear which) and posted the following benchmark comparison to a 2019 top of the line iMac with the 580x. The M1 GPU is obviously slower, but not by as much as you might think. And the CPU absolutely smokes it. You can compare other, user-submitted benchmarks at a link for the next tweet in the chain for other points of reference. Whether or not you use Affinity products, it's likely a decent stand-in for what the Adobe suite should look like when it's fully ported.

Jules Urbach, the CEO of OTOY who makes OctaneRender, claims that they can "squeeze +100GB of floating point textures" into the 16GB M1 models, because essentially they can address the RAM as VRAM and apparently M1 uses a "unique HW compression" that is debuting to desktop GPUs with the Apple chip. Frankly GPU stuff is out of my paygrade and I have no idea how impressive that is or is not.

There is an M1 version of Blender on the way, but it's not out yet. Lots of speculation about when on the Blender forums but no authoritative answer. Soon?

Cinebench for Apple Silicon is, of course, out. But I can't dig up any M1 benches yet. Final Cut Pro is out now as well, and I'm sure we'll have numbers and such soon enough. Expect the latter to absolutely thrash every existing Mac, however, based purely on how well the iPhone 12 already does. This is probably more about dedicated hardware encoding (I think?) then brute CPU / GPU force. But if you're primarily interested in real-life workloads, that shouldn't matter much.

Not real-world, again, but someone has run an M1 Mac through GFXBench, which is a passable stand-in for gaming performance. If you browse through the listings, that puts it about 40-50% faster than the top-end 96EU Tiger Lake IGP. Also bests the MX450, and hovers right around the performance of a GTX 1050 Ti Max-Q (which is the fastest GPU option in the 13" Razer Blade Stealth, for reference).
 
Last edited:

Gabebear

macrumors regular
Nov 14, 2018
125
191
We have various peeks into real-world performance, though it very much depends on what you're looking for.

Geekbench is not real world, but it's worth noting that there's enough submissions now for the Mac listings to have an averaged listing for the MBP. It looks good. It's Geekbench, so apply your personal biases accordingly.

The head of Affinity Photo has an M1 Mac (not clear which) and posted the following benchmark comparison to a 2019 top of the line iMac with the 580x. The M1 GPU is obviously slower, but not by as much as you might think. And the CPU absolutely smokes it. You can compare other, user-submitted benchmarks at a link for the next tweet in the chain for other points of reference. Whether or not you use Affinity products, it's likely a decent stand-in for what the Adobe suite should look like when it's fully ported.

Jules Urbach, the CEO of OTOY who makes OctaneRender, claims that they can "squeeze +100GB of floating point textures" into the 16GB M1 models, because essentially they can address the RAM as VRAM and apparently M1 uses a "unique HW compression" that is debuting to desktop GPUs with the Apple chip. Frankly GPU stuff is out of my paygrade and I have no idea how impressive that is or is not.

There is an M1 version of Blender on the way, but it's not out yet. Lots of speculation about when on the Blender forums but no authoritative answer. Soon?

Cinebench for Apple Silicon is, of course, out. But I can't dig up any M1 benches yet. Final Cut Pro is out now as well, and I'm sure we'll have numbers and such soon enough. Expect the latter to absolutely thrash every existing Mac, however, based purely on how well the iPhone 12 already does. This is probably more about dedicated hardware encoding (I think?) then brute CPU / GPU force. But if you're primarily interested in real-life workloads, that shouldn't matter much.

Not real-world, again, but someone has run an M1 Mac through GFXBench, which is a passable stand-in for gaming performance. If you browse through the listings, that puts it about 40-50% faster than the top-end 96EU Tiger Lake IGP. Also bests the MX450, and hovers right around the performance of a GTX 1050 Ti Max-Q (which is the fastest GPU option in the 13" Razer Blade Stealth, for reference).
That M1 benchmark is kneck and kneck with the Radeon 5500M in the high-end 16” MacBook Pro https://gfxbench.com/device.jsp?benchmark=gfx50&os=OS X&api=metal&cpu-arch=x86&hwtype=dGPU&hwname=AMD Radeon Pro 5500M&did=79795504&D=AMD Radeon Pro 5500M
 
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