Some notes on the M1 Macbook Pro (Benchmarks, comparisons to i7 gaming rig)

[dmccloud]

I went ahead and picked up a 13" MBP with the M1 on Friday (8GB/521GB SSD), and I have been running some tests to see just how good battery life is, and what it takes to generate a spinning beachball in Safari. On the battery life side, I unplugged the Pro from its charger and fired up World of Warcraft. I was playing it for around 30 minutes on medium-high settings, then quit the game to work on some coding I needed to do. I forgot to check the battery immediately after closing WoW, but when I did check (about 10 minutes later), I still had 98% battery remaining. This machine sips battery so slowly, I keep thinking the built-in battery indicator is broken.

Today, I decided to see what it would take to cause Safari to start spinning beachballs. While I didn't get a specific count, it was around 180 tabs, with 20 being YouTube videos. That did bring down the battery life noticeably, but I've had this machine off charger for around 7 hours and still have 65% battery remaining at this time. Once I had closed around 10 tabs, the beachballs stopped and the machine started operating normally. The other thing I have noticed is that the laptop often feels cold to the touch after idling for an extended period of time. The only place I can even detect the slightest warming is just above the touchbar at the center of the base. This may be due to living in Alaska and it being under 20 degrees at the moment, but heating has not been a factor at all with this machine.

I will be playing around with Final Cut Pro and some 4K video files to see just how well the machine handles them, I might even see if I can push Logic Pro as hard as Max Tech and others have done over the last few weeks. But if the first few days are any indication of what to expect, I will most likely be impressed with what my testing shows...

*NOTE:* I will be adding to this thread as I do some more testing and benchmarking. Currently running Cinebench R23 on both my Gaming Rig and M1 Pro.

 

[dmccloud]

Here's my Cinebench R23 results:

MSI Laptop (i7-9750H, 16GB DDR4, GTX 1660Ti): 1069 (Single Core); 5416 (Multi-Core)

MacBook Pro (M1, 8GB RAM): 1518 (Single Core); 7747 (Multi Core)

The differences in the Multi Core scores is what stands out to me, especially since the i7 is a 6-core CPU with hyperthreading, while the M1 has 4 performance and 4 efficiency cores. The i7 rig never got hot, but I could hear the air being pushed out of the machine to cool it down. The MacBook Pro was dead silent and never heated up even slightly.

 

[dmccloud]

I also ran Geekbench 5 on both systems. While the CPU test is the biggest point of comparison, I'll also include the Compute scores to compare how the M1 and both GPUs in the MSI handle those tests:

MSI: 1074 Single-core, 5065 Multi-core
62263 OpenCL, 65953 CUDA, 50803 Vulkan (GTX 1660Ti)
5626 OpenCL, 5885 Vulkan (Intel UHD 630)

MacBook Pro: 1727 Single-Core, 7586 Multi-Core
19260 OpenCL, 21470 Metal

Going into this test, I expected the MSI to have the better compute scores due to the presence of the dedicated GPU, and the testing proved that theory right. What I did not expect was that the M1 would outpace the Intel iGPU by a bigger ratio (almost 4x the performance) than the 1660ti outpaced the M1 (slightly more than 3x the performance). I don't have an 11th gen Intel with their Xe iGPU to compare this to, but my guess is that even Intel's newest (and allegedly best) iGPU still can't touch the M1 in terms of performance.

 

[VideoFreek]

Thanks for posting this--very interesting thread. The benchmarks are impressive; to think this is only a low-end machine with Apple's new architecture. Exciting times ahead, no doubt. Benchmarks are nice, but I am very interested to hear about your real-world experience with FCPX. Looking forward to further reports.

 

[dmccloud]

I am currently downloading some 4K sample files to test with FCP (no x in the name anymore), should be interesting to see how those files are handled by the app. So far, the system has remained responsive no matter what files I've thrown into Final Cut, with both CPU and RAM utilization staying well within the green range.