Will we ever see a bump as impressive as the M1 again?

[MayaUser]

Did the M1 replace Alder Lake? What was the point of all this?

He clearly miss-understood you...he is comparing the today Intel SoC with current M chips while you were comparing the first M1 with the 10th gen Intel
And i agree that Apple shocked Intel with their M chips and with the fact they ditch Intel, for them (Intel) to come up with something good again.

 

[MayaUser]

The point is that Intel isn't far behind apple

He was talking about the past, you are talking about the present
Intel is still far behind Apple in mobile tech. Apple from Steve era was an "mobile company"
I still remember the first Intel fanless 12" Macbook....jesus christ what a garbage of an Intel SoC it was even for those days

 

[maflynn]

If you want to see how far Intel is behind Apple run the benchmark again but this time on battery power.

I'm not arguing that, in fact one of the biggest advantages I see is that apple has is the ability to run full bore on battery life. I absolutely love this feature

 

[MayaUser]

Of course that's easier said than done, it's not like apple can just flip a switch and clock their processors this high (pipelines would have to be redesigned). But I think it'd make sense for them to say "Here, this is the M1 Extreme, it's going into the Mac Pro, and we are clocking it to 3.9ghz instead of 3.5ghz" - power consumption is certainly less of an issue here.

They can do whatever they want, they have the know how...they have the chip guy that was on Intel when Intel was on top...that guy knows desktop SoC as well....but here is about Apple mentality, they are an mobile company and of the most profitable company int he world...so instead of making a true different SoC for desktops they go with this trend that works from both performance and profit points of view

 

[MayaUser]

I'm not arguing that, in fact one of the biggest advantages I see is that apple has is the ability to run full bore on battery life. I absolutely love this feature

Thats one advantage and another one is that i can work on battery in maya full load for double the time compared to the former Intel 16" Mbp of mine. Another advantage is the heat, far less heat on the chassis, another, almost no fan noise ...so overall the whole experience is far far ahead of what Intel could and can offer in the mobile space

 

[mi7chy]

If you want to see how far Intel is behind Apple run the benchmark again but this time on battery power.

Just don't do anything demanding otherwise apps crash at <1 hour and battery dies at ~1 hour 36 mins.

 

[MayaUser]

Just don't do anything demanding otherwise apps crash at <1 hour and battery dies at ~1 hour 36 mins.

what apps?? Fortnite is one app, and its a gaming app
Maya never crushed on me or anything else...on Intel Macs you dont need to wait for crash because in 2 hours tops the laptops is dead
Can you do anything else then watch youtube..and thats one person, maybe he got a lemon or that app is trash for macOS

 

[maflynn]

Just don't do anything demanding otherwise apps crash

FWIW. I've yet to see any crashes.

and its a gaming app

Doesn't matter, in fact games are one of the best ways to stress computers because game developers tend to push the envelopes more then what other app developers will.

 

[MayaUser]

FWIW. I've yet to see any crashes.

Doesn't matter, in fact games are one of the best ways to stress computers because game developers tend to push the envelopes more then what other app developers will.

not really..still those ridiculous benchmark that stress out both cpu and gpu are the stress factors that in real life you will almost never face
on games...its too hard because it depends on the game...Fornite is no near as demanding compared to Maya projects...fortnite is a game that works on mobile too i think...is not Crysis 6 or 7 or whatever is the most recent and so on that stress to the max both cpu and especially the gpu
If that user come here and show us that a game from the 90 is not working and it crash....means the Macbook is garbage because it cannot run an 25-30 years old game for no matter the reason is ?! ))

 

[mi7chy]

Don't know why some go straight into defense mode when they should instead think of solution like ~35% longer battery life with TSMC N3E on the next M2 Max. Battery is already at FAA limit of 100Wh. Maybe lower power display tech?

 

[antiprotest]

"Ever" is an infinitely long time. If you mean in the very near future, probably not. But if you mean in two billion years or at some point before the extinction of humanity, then I am certain we will.

 

[senttoschool]

The point is that Intel isn't far behind apple

Define "far".

Intel is at least 2 generations behind the M1 by my estimation.

 

[Gudi]

It's not just performance and power-efficiency with which Apple shocked Intel. The main point is that they're doing it all by themselves. If an ARM license allows every OEM to build their own CPUs, then the business model of Intel is gone for good. They'll never be able to charge a premium again.

 

[leman]

It's not just performance and power-efficiency with which Apple shocked Intel. The main point is that they're doing it all by themselves. If an ARM license allows every OEM to build their own CPUs, then the business model of Intel is gone for good. They'll never be able to charge a premium again.

ARM offered architectural licenses for a while now. It's just that there are not many companies for which developing their own chips makes commercial sense and even fewer ones capable of designing a CPU that can challenge x86. So far Apple is pretty much the only one and it will probably stay like that for a while (but I'm keeping watch for Qualcomm post Nuvia acquisition).

 

[thenewperson]

The point is that Intel isn't far behind apple

But that has nothing to do with OP's question regarding the bump from 8/9/10th gen Intel to M1, which was huge because Intel was far behind Apple.

 

[jdb8167]

Just don't do anything demanding otherwise apps crash at <1 hour and battery dies at ~1 hour 36 mins.

Apple could throttle performance like the Alder Lake laptops do. But since most people don't use a Mac for games, they don't need to do this. Now if you can find someone using a professional app that drains the battery in under 2 hours, I would say Apple has a potential problem and should probably provide more power categories than high/low power. But so far, this doesn't seem to be a problem.

 

[ArkSingularity]

They can do whatever they want, they have the know how...they have the chip guy that was on Intel when Intel was on top...that guy knows desktop SoC as well....but here is about Apple mentality, they are an mobile company and of the most profitable company int he world...so instead of making a true different SoC for desktops they go with this trend that works from both performance and profit points of view

Oh they most certainly can, but it's not necessarily as simple as flipping a switch. They would have to redesign some things internally in order to support these kinds of ludicrously high clocks (which they certainly have the expertise to do, but they would have to explicitly design their chips for this). The CPU's pipeline architecture is a huge factor here. Shorter pipelines are simpler, more power efficient, and come with a lower branch misprediction penalty, but they can't support the same kinds of clock speeds that longer pipelines can (which is part of why you don't see a whole lot of Cortex A53's at 3ghz).

Only Apple knows what the limits of their chips are, but it's unlikely that they could just flip a switch and clock them to 5ghz today. They'd likely have to do some architectural tweaking to make that work first, but hey, they might already be on it. I doubt it's a problem they haven't anticipated.

 

[terminator-jq]

As a few others have said, our best chance at big leap in performance will probably come from the M3 generation. The move to 3nm opens up a lot of possibilities for both performance and efficiency. On the CPU side, Apple, has already proven that they can outdo Intel. Its the GPU side where Apple needs to do some catching up to get their chips in a more competitive position when compared to Nvidia.

 

[mi7chy]

Intel is at least 2 generations behind the M1 by my estimation.

Alder Lake and Raptor Lake are built on Intel 7 (10nm) so two nodes behind the competition. Don't know why Intel are stubborn with outsourcing CPU to TSMC when they've already done so with Intel Arc GPU built on TSMC 6nm. Intel CPU on TSMC N5P would probably put them at #1, AMD #2 and AS last.

 

[Zest28]

AMD wasn't that far behind. In fact, AMD had the higher multiscore over M1 at the time for their 35W mobile CPU. M1 was the king of single-core performance though.

 

[NT1440]

Alder Lake and Raptor Lake are built on Intel 7 (10nm) so two nodes behind the competition. Don't know why Intel are stubborn with outsourcing CPU to TSMC when they've already done so with Intel Arc GPU built on TSMC 6nm. Intel CPU on TSMC N5P would probably put them at #1, AMD #2 and AS last.

Day after day you insist that it’s all about the node.

 

[darngooddesign]

The only way there will be an equally impressive bump is if Apple releases a really mediocre chip first.

Now that I think about it, the MacPro is still Intel which means that we will see an impressive bump when it gets an Ultra Plus Max chip.

 

[nquinn]

Nearly 30-years ago*

“Will we ever see a bump as impressive as the 601 again?”

I don't really mean "ever" - more like anytime in next 10-15yrs or so

 

[Adult80HD]

I'm on my first long trip since getting the M1 Pro MacBook Pro last November and it's a monster of a laptop on a trip. It runs Windows faster than my i7-10700 desktop on Parallels and it can run my full workloads without any heat or fan noise and with all-day battery life. I'm thinking about running all of my Windows stuff on Parallels now.

I've been looking at laptops this week for a gamer and I don't think that there's anything in the Windows world that's comparable at this time.

So Apple is probably going to be the most efficient for mobile while they are underwater in desktop.

Underwater is an overstatement. I bought a couple Mac Studios for my workplace last March, and for the apps we are using heavily--photo-oriented applications like Lightroom, Photoshop and related--the Studio beats out even my high-end AMD Threadrippers with top of the line Nvidia cards on all but one or two tasks. To be honest, I was really surprised by the result, I didn't expect it at all but the numbers didn't lie. The unified memory system has some huge advantages that can outweigh pure raw CPU benchmark scores in real-world use cases.

 

[nquinn]

We likely will, but not for a long time. The next time Apple shifts to a dramatically new node, instruction set (I’m sure they’ll eventually go to a proprietary one), or some combination of the two, we’ll see a bigger jump. Otherwise we can expect to see similar jumps to the annual improvements in the A-series.


Keep in mind that when Apple moves to 3nm for the M3 it will result in some combination of both performance and efficiency improvements, and Apple is likely to lean more towards efficiency, meaning the chip will consume less power and generate less heat.

Also, throttling isn’t a massive concern with the Air. Its customer base primarily won’t be pushing it to its limit (if you are then the MacBook for you is the Pro), and the chip scales wonderfully to small and large workloads, so if you do nothing more than simple productivity tasks you won’t notice any throttling at all.

It's wild to me that the next 3 years or so still show a lot of aggressive performance growth from all chips. Intel's meteor lake and future jim keller projects are still expecting 20%+ performance increases.

These smaller 3nm, 2nm, etc nodes are going a long way.