Is it new M1 Air placebo or is it really faster than my 27" 2017 iMac?

[Tagbert]

What does TB stand for/mean?

Turbo Boost, probably

 

[pshufd]

Geekbench 5 for the 2017 iMac 3.4 Ghz is 911/3,204. It's 1,742/7,625 for the MacBook M1 Air. So the Air should feel considerably faster. The area where the iMac may be faster is in GPU performance where that Radeon Pro 570 is probably 50% stronger than the M1 integrated graphics.

 

[opeter]

Turbo Boost, probably

Thank you, now I understand.

 

[Abazigal]

I just p[icked up an air with 16gb and 1tb and am really loving it. It almost seems faster using photo mechanic and Lightroom than my 27" iMac with 64gb ram quad i7 4.2. Am I feeling a placebo effect or is the M1 really that much better? I am thinking of ditching the iMac and using the air as my main computer connected to a 27" 4k when at home. How are people doing with long term every day usage as their main machine? or should I wait till there are 27" M1 iMacs?

The M1 Mac is designed to "feel" faster.

Apple’s M1 is a fast CPU—but M1 Macs feel even faster due to QoS

Howard Oakley did an excellent deep dive on M1 scheduling and performance.

arstechnica.com

Howard Oakley—author of several Mac-native utilities such as Cormorant, Spundle, and Stibium—did some digging to find out why his M1 Mac felt faster than Intel Macs did, and he concluded that the answer is QoS. If you're not familiar with the term, it's short for Quality of Service—and it's all about task scheduling.

Apple's QoS strategy for the M1 Mac is an excellent example of engineering for the actual pain point in a workload rather than chasing arbitrary metrics. Leaving the high-performance Firestorm cores idle when executing background tasks means that they can devote their full performance to the userInitiated and userInteractive tasks as they come in, avoiding the perception that the system is unresponsive or even "ignoring" the user.

So it's really a case of hardware and software optimisation.

 

[tokenmacdude]

What does TB stand for/mean?

Thunderbolt

 

[mp8]

x

 

[rafark]

Well, if you disable TB, a fancy i9 loses 50-60% of it's performance, so it's not particularly surprising. TB is essential to x86 burst performance, disabling it takes away all the advantages of the platform.

What the h is tb? Terabyte? Thunderbolt? Touchbar?

 

[Wolf1701]

What the h is tb? Terabyte? Thunderbolt? Touchbar?

HT was the intended acronym I suppose

 

[robco74]

I believe it's TurboBoost, ramping up the clock on one core to get better single threaded performance.

 

[leman]

What the h is tb? Terabyte? Thunderbolt? Touchbar?

In the context of this thread: turbo boost (the automatic on-demand CPU overclocking that all modern CPUs do)

 

[jdb8167]

The M1 Mac is designed to "feel" faster.

Apple’s M1 is a fast CPU—but M1 Macs feel even faster due to QoS

Howard Oakley did an excellent deep dive on M1 scheduling and performance.

arstechnica.com

So it's really a case of hardware and software optimisation.

The actual Howard Oakley article is How M1 Macs feel faster than Intel models: it’s about QoS. Working on some experimental software yesterday and I was trying to apply the QoS settings and found something odd. If I set the QoS to Background it still used one performance core but if I set it up one level to Utility, it only used efficiency cores. No idea why that is but I found it interesting and requires more research.