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leman

macrumors Core
Oct 14, 2008
19,518
19,669
So I wonder if they aren’t going to clock down theM1 in the Air and just let let thermal throttle most of the time? That is kinda hard to believe they would do that

Why? That is the reasonable thing to do. These chips will have excellent power management.
 
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jav6454

macrumors Core
Nov 14, 2007
22,303
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1 Geostationary Tower Plaza
Maybe in your mind. It was a simple question and statement.
When people ask for those specs, it usually is for comparison purposes. Right now there is no need as we have nothing to compare it to. Intel chips? Different architecture. So comparison there is useless on a MHz by MHz basis. You need to run benchmarks and real time tests to see if Intel or A-Si comes on top.
 

ascender

macrumors 603
Dec 8, 2005
5,021
2,897
I’m sure these will be in the hands of reviewers very shortly and they’ll run the benchmarks we all want to see.
 

lostngone

macrumors 65816
Original poster
Aug 11, 2003
1,431
3,804
Anchorage
When people ask for those specs, it usually is for comparison purposes. Right now there is no need as we have nothing to compare it to. Intel chips? Different architecture. So comparison there is useless on a MHz by MHz basis. You need to run benchmarks and real time tests to see if Intel or A-Si comes on top.

Because, “I”, “ME”, “THE PERSON TYPING THIS” just wants to know. Is that so hard to believe? Does it bother that much that someone just wants to know? I had already stated that you can’t compare x86 Clock speed to this architecture three posts above your original post pointing out the same thing.

If if makes you feel better, let’s say I want hard data showing that the M1 in the Air, Pro and Mini are all running at the exact same speed when you take the thermal management aspect out of the equation.
 
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Jimmy James

macrumors 603
Oct 26, 2008
5,489
4,067
Magicland
Very slick marketing on Apple's part in all this. All this 2x, 3x, 6x faster... compared to which chips and graphics cards exactly? Intel 8th gen from 2017?

Clock speed would also be useful to compare the MacBook Air to the pro, or to the iPad.
I’m assuming it’s compared to the slowest Intel Mac equivalent.
 

Le0M

macrumors 6502a
Aug 13, 2020
942
1,282
They didn't give a single useful performance metric. We know only slightly more now than we did before the event started.
Except that they run 3 - or more - times faster than the previous ones.
 

Fomalhaut

macrumors 68000
Oct 6, 2020
1,993
1,724
Agreed. Without the actual GHz rating then we're missing out on an ability to compare like for like.
I presume mean compare the new MacBook Air, Pro & Mac Mini to each other? Or to compare to M1 to the A14?

It makes no sense to compare the M1 to any x86 processor using clock speed alone. It wouldn't give any meaningful information that I can see.
 

Fomalhaut

macrumors 68000
Oct 6, 2020
1,993
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According to CPU monkey the M1 runs at 1.8GHz base clock and boosts to 3.1GHz on all cores.
I think the CPU Monkey stats are not yet capable of showing heterogeneous (big/little hybrid) CPU figures, so the best they can do is call the efficiency cores "base clock" and the performance cores "turbo". AFAIK, the Apple SoCs run at two different base frequencies - 1.8GHz for efficiency cores and 3.1GHz for performance cores. These clocks can vary depending on load, to save power)
 

JVo

macrumors newbie
Nov 27, 2012
28
6
I think Apple needs to provide some sort of performance index for comparisons among their own Apple Silicon machines. Like we need to have some sense of how many "x" Macbook Pro will be at peak vs. Macbook Air. Such as "1.2x" or "1000" vs. "800", similar to how benchmarks are done. How about an "Applemark" scale?

How is a person supposed to know whether it's worth it to buy a Pro over an Air, leaving aside battery size?

(And please don't reply saying you can't compare M1 to Intel Hz. Got that message from the many replies already. That's not my point)
 

Cyberpower678

macrumors 6502
Apr 28, 2015
420
352
Everywhere
What should be advertised these days is the IPS rather than clock speed. The Mac IPS on a single core and the Mac IPS on all cores. Or clock with IPC. That is the truest metric of a CPUs speed.
 
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Rastafabi

macrumors 6502
Mar 12, 2013
348
201
Europe
That would be completely ridiculous. You just suggested that the M1 outperforms latest AMD Zen3 desktop CPUs by 30% in single core. […]
Well… hadn't apple said so themselves? They talked about having the fastest CPU core [period]. And actually I wouldn't even wonder given that an iPhone 12 already is close to an AMD Zen3 5950x. Though I wouldn't think it will be 30% at all, but we could very well see single to lower double digit figures.
 

Fomalhaut

macrumors 68000
Oct 6, 2020
1,993
1,724
I think Apple needs to provide some sort of performance index for comparisons among their own Apple Silicon machines. Like we need to have some sense of how many "x" Macbook Pro will be at peak vs. Macbook Air. Such as "1.2x" or "1000" vs. "800", similar to how benchmarks are done. How about an "Applemark" scale?

How is a person supposed to know whether it's worth it to buy a Pro over an Air, leaving aside battery size?

(And please don't reply saying you can't compare M1 to Intel Hz. Got that message from the many replies already. That's not my point)
I think we'll have to wait for benchmark results before that is clear. Probably a combination of Geekbench, Cinebench, video encoding and gaming tests, which all the YouTube channels seem to do!

What I would like to see are some graphs of temperature and CPU/GPU frequency over time, but long-running or intensive tasks. That would give an idea of how much the MacBook Air gets throttled when it gets hot.
 

deeddawg

macrumors G5
Jun 14, 2010
12,467
6,570
US
Because, “I”, “ME”, “THE PERSON TYPING THIS” just wants to know. Is that so hard to believe? Does it bother that much that someone just wants to know?
Maybe your seemingly negative implication (even if inadvertent) set the tone in which people are responding?

In any event the actual figure is moot for the various reasons mentioned. Even comparing the chip across Air/Pro/Mini you’re dealing with different cooling systems which will affect how long the cpu can burst and how much/soon it will throttle.

The useful info will come with the various benchmarks, the more they simulate real world usage the better.


Unless I missed it I find it quite odd they didn’t mention actual processor speed.
 

fxbeta

macrumors member
Sep 23, 2014
90
59
They never talk about those specs on their iPhones or iPads either. Just be glad they are telling you how much RAM is inside the device!
 

Erehy Dobon

Suspended
Feb 16, 2018
2,161
2,017
No service
clockspeed is meaningless. All that matters is empirical performance.
Actual real-world performance is more meaningful.

A max clock frequency is far less meaningful if the CPU can only sustain it for a few minutes.

This is the same as peak data transfer rates on SSDs. Once you fill up the drive cache for large files, the speeds might come to screeching halt.

A lot of tech media site readers simply don't get this.
 
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jz0309

Contributor
Sep 25, 2018
11,380
30,019
SoCal
Because, “I”, “ME”, “THE PERSON TYPING THIS” just wants to know. Is that so hard to believe? Does it bother that much that someone just wants to know? I had already stated that you can’t compare x86 Clock speed to this architecture three posts above your original post pointing out the same thing.

If if makes you feel better, let’s say I want hard data showing that the M1 in the Air, Pro and Mini are all running at the exact same speed when you take the thermal management aspect out of the equation.
I get that you want to know, but, Apple has never provided that info for any of their own chips afaik, and they will not start now nor will they do in the future.
Geeks like us want as much detail as possible, Apple does not want to confuse the average consumer who does not care nor understands.
As others have said, you'll get your answer next week from reviewers, not from Apple
 

the8thark

macrumors 601
Apr 18, 2011
4,628
1,735
They didn't give a single useful performance metric. We know only slightly more now than we did before the event started.
Sharing information like Ghz numbers is just as useless as it's not an apples to apples comparison.
We did get a operations per second. 11 trillion of them. I assume that's 11T FLOPS. That's a useful figure to share.

We need to realise that the only meaningful comparisons will be in app performance tests / benchmarks.
 

the8thark

macrumors 601
Apr 18, 2011
4,628
1,735
I want hard data showing that the M1 in the Air, Pro and Mini are all running at the exact same speed when you take the thermal management aspect out of the equation.
Apple's whole point of ASi is to have the best performance at the lowest wattage and heat out out. Taking the M1 out of each portable Mac doesn't prove anything. The M1 is most likely tweaked to be slightly different for each portable Mac, based on the max thermals they can handle at best performance. It's possible that it would be the same atoms, and just different firmware on each.

You want to take the exact reason why the M1 exists out of the equation.
 

cmaier

Suspended
Jul 25, 2007
25,405
33,474
California
Unless I missed it I find it quite odd they didn’t mention actual processor speed. Just X times faster.

I looked on the Apples tech specs for the Air no mention there either.
Not odd at all. It’s meaningless. You have nothing to compare it to. A 2GHz AMD xxx processor may run faster than a 3GHz Intel xxx processor and slower than a 1.5GHz Arm processor.
 

Fomalhaut

macrumors 68000
Oct 6, 2020
1,993
1,724
Not odd at all. It’s meaningless. You have nothing to compare it to. A 2GHz AMD xxx processor may run faster than a 3GHz Intel xxx processor and slower than a 1.5GHz Arm processor.
It would be interesting to know if there are any clock speed differences between the 3 new models using the M1 SoC. They may well all be the same, in which case it would also be good to see how clock speed varies under load on the Mini and MacBook Pro that have active cooling, compared to the Air that doesn't.

No doubt this data will become available once reviewers get their hands on them and start running benchmarks.
 

theorist9

macrumors 68040
May 28, 2015
3,880
3,059
Not odd at all. It’s meaningless. You have nothing to compare it to. A 2GHz AMD xxx processor may run faster than a 3GHz Intel xxx processor and slower than a 1.5GHz Arm processor.
While some comparisons are meaningless, not all are. For example, I would think it would be very interesting to know if there are differences in clock speed between the M1's in the MBP, MBA, and Mini. These machines, after all, have different thermal envelopes. Plus efficiency is of course less of an issue for the Mini (not a non-issue, but less of an issue).

And it might also be interesting to know if there are differences in clock speeds between the M1 and the A14.
 
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