Take out the fan from your 21.5" iMac and see if it works for more than a day at full load. The MBA can do that and iMac can't.
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MacBook Air M1 base, Im not impressed.
- Thread starter Sledneck52
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What if he doesn’t care about that?
That’s like saying take out the on-board RAM from the M1 and see if it even boots.
I think it's an interesting account on how user expectations differ from the technological reality, which again confirms that Apple's marketing has chosen a good strategy (focusing on vague generational claims instead of tech-related facts).
In the eight years of the technological progress, CPUs became around two times faster (comparing your i7-3770 to something like the i7-10700). So you can choose to double your performance at the same power consumption level or get a smaller machine that uses less power and delivers the same performance as your old one. You could also triple your performance by choosing something like an i9-10900K, which has 60% higher power usage than your i7-3770). I understand that it feels like things should have become better, but they simply didn't — the yearly performance increase was around 5-10% average for the last decade.
Apple's new chips change the equation somewhat since they consume much less power than equivalent PC hardware, but in absolute terms, they are not faster. M1 is comparable to a premium-level x86 CPU for ultracompact laptops or an entry-level desktop CPU (with some caveats), so looking at the industry progress over the last couple of years, the fact that it can significantly outperform a high-end desktop of 2012 is actually not half bad. Once the prosumer Apple Silicon comes out (hopefully next week), it should give you a 2-3x boost while still consuming half the power of your iMac.
well, Why did he even buy a MacBook Air? MacBook Air has been a low end Mac. The high-end MacBooks are gonna make the M1 Air nothing in terms of CPU and GPU power.
Don't give in too the hype. The M1 is a low-end chip. I on the other hand will wait for the real deal. 16" MBP with M1X.
I agree. Statements like that seem defensive when there is no need to be.
AFAIK, no one is arguing against the impressive capabilities of a fanless MBA, or at least that is not my interpretation of any of the posts.
I think the OP is just sharing a similar experience to me that based off of the M1 hype, and (at least for me) the age difference between the M1 and Macs that are almost a decade old, the performance differences isn't as dramatic as some of us hoped it would be.
That is exactly my point I was making. It isn't that the M1 Mac Mini is a bad computer, not at all and I love it, I just expected more after all this time.
I think about the differences between my pre-PPC Macs, to my G3 Macs, then my G4, G5, and the first Intels Macs, and even only just a few years in between models, it was a very dramatic difference in performance. The progress has slowed a lot, or at least it seems like it has.
Not saying anything bad about Apple either, it is just the way the industry is right now. Hopefully AS will change that.
Super-scalar processors were a relatively new thing back than, engineers were figuring things our and the improvements were advanced with ridicules speed. The tech has matured considerably since then and now we only get little tweaks here and there.
Apple has managed to dramatically lower the power consumption without sacrificing performance, but they didn't move the performance goalposts. So you'll be getting performance of large machines out of small machines, but that's about it.
I'm still waiting for my base model M1 MBA to NOT be able to do something I need it to do. I haven't found an application yet that it couldn't handle. A couple of my more high end apps take a few more seconds to load, and that's about the only thing I can think of to complain about. Best computer I've ever owned, and it's not even close.
Sounds like OP is maybe doing more demanding things than I am though. The most complicated thing I do on my mine is probably Affinity Designer projects with lots and lots of layers.
Sounds like OP is maybe doing more demanding things than I am though. The most complicated thing I do on my mine is probably Affinity Designer projects with lots and lots of layers.
It actually seems like he’s doing very simple things that even a 9 year old computer can handle, like web browsing, office documents, etc.
If that's the case, I have no idea what he/she could possibly be talking about then. When I do those things, my computer doesn't even get warm to the touch, much less slow.
im not impressed either...my friends workstation with nvidia 3090, xeon 24 cores and 64 gb ram is better than this M1
M1 should be removed and Apple must go back to intel and nvidia, i miss the over 200-300W consumption and i miss the heat and fans
M1 should be removed and Apple must go back to intel and nvidia, i miss the over 200-300W consumption and i miss the heat and fans
I’m in the same boat, seriously impressed by the MBA, which is why I also got a Mac Mini M1 yesterday. Just been trying it out, it’s primarily a second server, but I’ve decided to use it for work in the office as well.
Just had 3 4K > 720p and 2 1080p > 480 transcodes on the go, to test it out. It hit 80% CPU use and that’s with Plex running under Rosetta 2. And while I was doing some work in Xcode, iCloud still syncing along with Safari and Music running. No complaints from me.
I’d have posted earlier, but it took me ages to pick myself up from the floor ?
As for using the M1 systems. If you’re not doing anything to really push the system, you’re not going to be particularly impressed by it.
I mean, I can do word processing very well on my, BBC Micro. Side-by-side with the MBA and Mac Mini, the BBC Micro is just as impressive ?
Shortly after I bought my M1 MBA, my son bought himself an M1 Mac mini and a 4K monitor. He's mostly using it for gaming, surprisingly enough, but is also using it to learn how to use Unreal Engine. It's handling both without a problem.
Even though gaming is not the forte of the M1, or most Macs if we’re honest. I’ve been pleasantly surprised by how capable it is.
Obviously it’s nothing in comparison to a good gaming rig, and I mostly use GeForce Now on my Macs. I’ve still been able to play quite a few games on the MBA. Including some via Crossover and Parallels during the Beta.
That quite impressed me, ok older games such as Metro Exodus and Borderlands 2 - they’re what I was in the mood for. But running on an Arm computer, virtualising a Windows Arm system, which in turn is emulating X64. That’s not bad at all when you think about the basic, entry-level, low power hardware we have with the M1.
There isn't much reason to expect boot time to be significantly faster. Apple seems to use fairly fast ssds, but a lot of booting involves small reads, meaning they are probably latency bound. As for other tasks, if they aren't significantly bottlenecked by the cpu of the older one and you aren't running out of memory on either machine, then I wouldn't expect to see a big difference.
As others have mentioned, Apple has optimized in favor of lower power requirements, which is good if you hated the fans, thermal throttling, and battery drain while plugged into the charger that I witnessed with some older macbook pros.
As others have mentioned, Apple has optimized in favor of lower power requirements, which is good if you hated the fans, thermal throttling, and battery drain while plugged into the charger that I witnessed with some older macbook pros.
Wow.. looks like I offended some people ??♂️ Not my intention. Just talking about my experience with the M1 so far. I could care less how many watts it uses.. I don’t examine my electric bill.
Very rarely will I here the fans in my 2013 iMac. My 2013 runs Chief architect way better then the M1. Yes.. I know it’s running under Rosetta 2 ?
Maybe the native version if one is to be released will take advantage of the M1 architecture.
But for every day tasks my 2013 is only “slightly” behind the M1 MacBook Air.
I don’t run benchmarks to get good fuzzy feelings knowing it has bigger computing numbers. I remember the Pentium 60 when it came out.. was leaps and bounds faster then any chip out there at the time.
I expected a noticeable real world performance increase. I’m sorry but I’m not seeing it. ??♂️
Very rarely will I here the fans in my 2013 iMac. My 2013 runs Chief architect way better then the M1. Yes.. I know it’s running under Rosetta 2 ?
Maybe the native version if one is to be released will take advantage of the M1 architecture.
But for every day tasks my 2013 is only “slightly” behind the M1 MacBook Air.
I don’t run benchmarks to get good fuzzy feelings knowing it has bigger computing numbers. I remember the Pentium 60 when it came out.. was leaps and bounds faster then any chip out there at the time.
I expected a noticeable real world performance increase. I’m sorry but I’m not seeing it. ??♂️
Personally, I’m not offended. Sorry if I missed it previously in the thread, but what kind of improvements would have actually “wowed” you? From my understanding you already had a very capable machine to begin with.
I get why you feel this way. On 2011 I bought an (Intel, obviously) iMac. Then, in 2015, I bought a MacBook Pro 15". It was mostly as fast as the iMac, since laptops are less powerful than desktops, so it didn't feel like much of an improvement. Then, the MacBook logic board failed and I bought a 2019 MacBook Pro 16". And, since Intel hasn't really improved its CPUs that much in the last 5 years, my new MacBook Pro is mostly the same speed as my older MacBook Pro, which in turn makes it mostly the same speed as my iMac, 10 years later!
You are probably experiencing the same thing, but with a few less Macs in between. The M1 is great, and Apple Silicon is improving very fast year over year, but it has been the first notable performance increase in half a decade. Of course it doesn't feel like 10-years worth of performance improvements. You would have gotten mostly the same speedup if you had updated a 2 year old MacBook instead of a 10 year old iMac.
(In case someone is curious, my first iMac was a 2011 21.5", scoring 729 points in GeekBench single core. My current MacBook Pro is a 2019 16" 9880HK, scoring 1009 points in GeekBench single core, so about a 30% increase in single core performance after 9 years).
I understand Apple’s stance on ditching Intel. You’re forced to design products based on another company’s constraints.
This is a great move for Apple!
I am excited for the next generation of the M series chips. I am also anxiously waiting for software developers to embrace the ARM architecture. As the Joker said.. “it’s all part of the plan” ?
My old iMac is 8 years old. I did upgrade to two 1GB SSD’s because mine had the Fusion drive.
I saw a good performance gain just doing that.
With the way everyone boasts about the M1 being a processing monster and it is to some extent, I expected to never see a bouncing icon again when starting an app.
I want things to open and be ready to use.
I love the Touch ID. We all were hoping for Face ID..
This is still Apple’s first generation with their own processors in laptops and desktops. It can only get better.
This is a great move for Apple!
I am excited for the next generation of the M series chips. I am also anxiously waiting for software developers to embrace the ARM architecture. As the Joker said.. “it’s all part of the plan” ?
My old iMac is 8 years old. I did upgrade to two 1GB SSD’s because mine had the Fusion drive.
I saw a good performance gain just doing that.
With the way everyone boasts about the M1 being a processing monster and it is to some extent, I expected to never see a bouncing icon again when starting an app.
I want things to open and be ready to use.
I love the Touch ID. We all were hoping for Face ID..
This is still Apple’s first generation with their own processors in laptops and desktops. It can only get better.
@Sledneck52 I won’t try to change your conclusion. However, I will attempt to explain why the “wow factor” varies.
Processing Cores
You mention your iMac is a 2013 21.5” i7 model, which has a quad-core CPU. The M1 is an octo-core CPU, four high-performance and four high-efficiency cores. However, let’s ignore the high-efficiency cores as they’ll be assigned small, background tasks such as I/O traffic (e.g., Wi-Fi, USB, SSD), Notifications Center operations, etc. It’s important to also note, multiple processors designs have a limitation, not every workload can and does utilize them all.
CPU Frequency
Your iMac’s Core i7 has a clock speed of up to 3.1GHz per core. The M1’s four high-performance cores are up to 3.2GHz each. Considering just these values, the M1 would be only ~3% faster. In contrast, my current Mac has a 2.5GHz dual-core CPU. Sticking with simple arithmetic, 2 x 2.5 = 5 vs. 3.2 x 4 = 12.8 (a 156% increase). Intel CPUs do have Turbo Boost, automatic overclocking, but again, let’s forget about it because that feature only applies to a single core and is normally applied in bursts. Lastly, every processor manufacturer has reached a clock speed ceiling (~5.5 GHz), which is why we’ve been seeing CPU and GPU designs with more and more cores.
CPU Efficiency
Beyond adding more cores, CPU engineers increased the onboard memory cache and the amount of instructions/operations cores can execute per cycle.
On consumer-class CPUs, the cache amount isn’t extremely significant (.e.g., 3 to 16MB). On the other hand, workstation-class CPUs can include 128MB+ but also have dozens of processing cores.
Unfortunately, the instructions per cycle (IPC) improvements have similarly been minor for each CPU generation. CPU Grade has a nice visualization.
To simplify a bit, there has only been ~30% IPC increase by Intel over seven years (the Sandy Bridge to Coffee Lake microarchitectures) — according to a single benchmark, though I don’t think you’ll disagree with these results.
Optimization
Instruction set extensions (e.g., SSE4, AVX) are designed for specific tasks (e.g., video conversion, floating point calculations, machine learning) aiding software developers in performing these operations as efficiently as possible. Beyond CPUs, this type of optimization has been available in add-on card format (e..g, graphics cards, audio cards, video capture cards). Apple’s M1 combines these implementations. While the Arm architecture has its own versions of instruction set extensions, the M1 system on a chip (SoC) integrates hardware additions that behave like accelerator add-on cards (e.g., Neural Engine). When software developers fully utilize these, performance will/should be as optimal as possible (e.g., Apple used Intel’s SSE in iTunes for audio file conversions), therefore, creating the biggest boost in performance. Of course, proper and full implementation requires significant time and effort, plus whether or not there is an applicable, optimized component available for the use case.
Processing Cores
You mention your iMac is a 2013 21.5” i7 model, which has a quad-core CPU. The M1 is an octo-core CPU, four high-performance and four high-efficiency cores. However, let’s ignore the high-efficiency cores as they’ll be assigned small, background tasks such as I/O traffic (e.g., Wi-Fi, USB, SSD), Notifications Center operations, etc. It’s important to also note, multiple processors designs have a limitation, not every workload can and does utilize them all.
CPU Frequency
Your iMac’s Core i7 has a clock speed of up to 3.1GHz per core. The M1’s four high-performance cores are up to 3.2GHz each. Considering just these values, the M1 would be only ~3% faster. In contrast, my current Mac has a 2.5GHz dual-core CPU. Sticking with simple arithmetic, 2 x 2.5 = 5 vs. 3.2 x 4 = 12.8 (a 156% increase). Intel CPUs do have Turbo Boost, automatic overclocking, but again, let’s forget about it because that feature only applies to a single core and is normally applied in bursts. Lastly, every processor manufacturer has reached a clock speed ceiling (~5.5 GHz), which is why we’ve been seeing CPU and GPU designs with more and more cores.
CPU Efficiency
Beyond adding more cores, CPU engineers increased the onboard memory cache and the amount of instructions/operations cores can execute per cycle.
On consumer-class CPUs, the cache amount isn’t extremely significant (.e.g., 3 to 16MB). On the other hand, workstation-class CPUs can include 128MB+ but also have dozens of processing cores.
Unfortunately, the instructions per cycle (IPC) improvements have similarly been minor for each CPU generation. CPU Grade has a nice visualization.
CPU Grade said:
To simplify a bit, there has only been ~30% IPC increase by Intel over seven years (the Sandy Bridge to Coffee Lake microarchitectures) — according to a single benchmark, though I don’t think you’ll disagree with these results.
Optimization
Instruction set extensions (e.g., SSE4, AVX) are designed for specific tasks (e.g., video conversion, floating point calculations, machine learning) aiding software developers in performing these operations as efficiently as possible. Beyond CPUs, this type of optimization has been available in add-on card format (e..g, graphics cards, audio cards, video capture cards). Apple’s M1 combines these implementations. While the Arm architecture has its own versions of instruction set extensions, the M1 system on a chip (SoC) integrates hardware additions that behave like accelerator add-on cards (e.g., Neural Engine). When software developers fully utilize these, performance will/should be as optimal as possible (e.g., Apple used Intel’s SSE in iTunes for audio file conversions), therefore, creating the biggest boost in performance. Of course, proper and full implementation requires significant time and effort, plus whether or not there is an applicable, optimized component available for the use case.
A new cpu isn't going to allow instant launches, and most of that probably isn't explicitly cpu bound. In launching an application, you typically require a large number of reads from disk and a lot of shuffling things around in memory and disk to deal with various dynamic linkage and other stuff. It doesn't even matter what the throughput of your newest SSD is, because most of these things are purely latency bound.
On common day to day tasks, I wouldn't expect too much difference across hardware. CPUs have been fast enough for most of this stuff since Core2, and most of the really strenuous stuff (eg decoding of 4K streams) leverages specialized hardware capabilities wherever possible.
Also, you put this under macbook air. Of course power use is a factor in those. No one wants a space heater with short battery life.
M1 is a processing monster, especially considering it’s power usage. Unfortunately, application startup is not something that will improve much with a faster CPU. It is limited by disk performance, cryptographic validation (which involves certificate check via internet), application design as well as OS optimizations. Maybe Apple will introduce some new OS features that will speed up software launch, who knows. In the meantime, if you want your apps to launch quickly, don’t shut down or restart your machine. Apple Silicon and macOS are optimized for resume from sleep, not cold boot.
TLDR: General computing rarely has impressive progress, especially lately. Demanding/specialized tasks will exhibit the biggest leaps.
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