Apple Announces The Apple Silicon M1: Ditching x86 - What to Expect, Based on A14
by Andrei Frumusanu on November 10, 2020 3:00 PM EST- Posted in
- Apple
- Apple A14
- Apple Silicon
- Apple M1
From Mobile to Mac: What to Expect?
To date, our performance comparisons for Apple’s chipsets have always been in the context of iPhone reviews, with the juxtaposition to x86 designs being a rather small footnote within the context of the articles. Today’s Apple Silicon launch event completely changes the narrative of what we portray in terms of performance, setting aside the typical apples vs oranges comparisons people usually argument with.
We currently do not have Apple Silicon devices and likely won’t get our hands on them for another few weeks, but we do have the A14, and expect the new Mac chips to be strongly based on the microarchitecture we’re seeing employed in the iPhone designs. Of course, we’re still comparing a phone chip versus a high-end laptop and even a high-end desktop chip, but given the performance numbers, that’s also exactly the point we’re trying to make here, setting the stage as the bare minimum of what Apple could achieve with their new Apple Silicon Mac chips.
The performance numbers of the A14 on this chart is relatively mind-boggling. If I were to release this data with the label of the A14 hidden, one would guess that the data-points came from some other x86 SKU from either AMD or Intel. The fact that the A14 currently competes with the very best top-performance designs that the x86 vendors have on the market today is just an astonishing feat.
Looking into the detailed scores, what again amazes me is the fact that the A14 not only keeps up, but actually beats both these competitors in memory-latency sensitive workloads such as 429.mcf and 471.omnetpp, even though they either have the same memory (i7-1185G7 with LPDDR4X-4266), or desktop-grade memory (5950X with DDR-3200).
Again, disregard the 456.hmmer score advantage of the A14, that’s majorly due to compiler discrepancies, subtract 33% for a more apt comparison figure.
Even in SPECfp which is even more dominated by memory heavy workloads, the A14 not only keeps up, but generally beats the Intel CPU design more often than not. AMD also wouldn’t be looking good if not for the recently released Zen3 design.
In the overall SPEC2006 chart, the A14 is performing absolutely fantastic, taking the lead in absolute performance only falling short of AMD’s recent Ryzen 5000 series.
The fact that Apple is able to achieve this in a total device power consumption of 5W including the SoC, DRAM, and regulators, versus +21W (1185G7) and 49W (5950X) package power figures, without DRAM or regulation, is absolutely mind-blowing.
There’s been a lot of criticism about more common benchmark suites such as GeekBench, but frankly I've found these concerns or arguments to be quite unfounded. The only factual differences between workloads in SPEC and workloads in GB5 is that the latter has less outlier tests which are memory-heavy, meaning it’s more of a CPU benchmark whereas SPEC has more tendency towards CPU+DRAM.
The fact that Apple does well in both workloads is evidence that they have an extremely well-balanced microarchitecture, and that Apple Silicon will be able to scale up to “desktop workloads” in terms of performance without much issue.
Where the Performance Trajectory Finally Intersects
During the release of the A7, people were pretty dismissive of the fact that Apple had called their microarchitecture a desktop-class design. People were also very dismissive of us calling the A11 and A12 reaching near desktop level performance figures a few years back, and today marks an important moment in time for the industry as Apple’s A14 now clearly is able to showcase performance that’s beyond the best that Intel can offer. It’s been a performance trajectory that’s been steadily executing and progressing for years:
Whilst in the past 5 years Intel has managed to increase their best single-thread performance by about 28%, Apple has managed to improve their designs by 198%, or 2.98x (let’s call it 3x) the performance of the Apple A9 of late 2015.
Apple’s performance trajectory and unquestioned execution over these years is what has made Apple Silicon a reality today. Anybody looking at the absurdness of that graph will realise that there simply was no other choice but for Apple to ditch Intel and x86 in favour of their own in-house microarchitecture – staying par for the course would have meant stagnation and worse consumer products.
Today’s announcements only covered Apple’s laptop-class Apple Silicon, whilst we don’t know the details at time of writing as to what Apple will be presenting, Apple’s enormous power efficiency advantage means that the new chip will be able to offer either vastly increased battery life, and/or, vastly increased performance, compared to the current Intel MacBook line-up.
Apple has claimed that they will completely transition their whole consumer line-up to Apple Silicon within two years, which is an indicator that we’ll be seeing a high-TDP many-core design to power a future Mac Pro. If the company is able to continue on their current performance trajectory, it will look extremely impressive.
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GeoffreyA - Saturday, December 12, 2020 - link
I tend to agree. You know, these technology companies of today are wielding great power in this world, yet it's not very visible perhaps. They control with a smile on their face. Chains work best when people don't know they're shackled.alpha754293 - Thursday, November 12, 2020 - link
With x86/x64 MacBooks, I can do more than just whatever Apple offers.Now, it's back to not really being able to do much with Macs again.
(It took probably close to a decade before technical computing apps were ported to MacOS on x86/x64. And now with this switch to ARM, guess that I won't be doing THAT anymore on any of the new Macs (since the apps, once again, aren't available, and hopefully, it won't take ANOTHER 10 years before the companies that make those programs, port them over. But then again, at least with x86/x64, they already had it for other OS platforms. This -- I'm not sure what any of the existing software vendors are going to do with this.)
samcolam - Friday, November 13, 2020 - link
Such an interesting thread.Tomatotech - Friday, November 13, 2020 - link
Lovely article. I read every word. Looking forward to actual reviews of the M1 soon.I think Apple has played a blinder here. Scores of millions of people have built up years of experience of using the iOS ecosystem to fill their wants. They are people who don’t mind paying extra for an iDevice. Now Apple is presenting them with the chance to transfer that experience to a laptop or desktop where they can run all their iOS apps (plus macOS apps.)
Now they don’t need to learn both iOS AND Windows or both iOS AND macOS. At work I see many people struggling with desktop OSes.
Apple has just said bye to all that. I’m old school IT, I can run 3 OSes on the same laptop without breaking a sweat, but that isn’t what the masses want, and it doesn’t help non-IT people achieve what they want. iOS & Android have done all that and more.
Google are trying with their Android-based chromebooks but it seems stuck at the low end for mass adoption. If Apple can deliver on this and it looks like they are doing so, their sales will soar.
MrCrispy - Friday, November 13, 2020 - link
You're talking about people with disposable income who want and can afford Apple's premium $$$ devices. Its not 'the masses', far from it. 'people who don’t mind paying extra for an iDevice' are first world rich people.There's nothing special about iOS or MacOS. They are sold based on hype and because its tied to the hardware.
btw Windows runs the same OS on everything from a wearable to a server and they did it years before anyone else. But Microsoft isn't 'cool' so no one talks about it.
Joe Guide - Friday, November 13, 2020 - link
There may be some truth to your comment. Apple's products can be more expensive, but if you match for performance to price, such as Dell's comparable computers, the difference becomes less.But now the game is flipped upside down. The new M1 chips seem unbeatable based on performance, efficiency and price. The base, cheapo, affordable MBA is proving to be world class.
Geekbench seems to suggest top single thread performance, and now actual performance on Affinity Photo suggests it's not hype.
https://twitter.com/andysomerfield/status/13268661...
Your point about iOS or MacOS being no better than Windows may be right. But you can't put Windows these new machines yet.
Silver5urfer - Friday, November 13, 2020 - link
Lol, unbeatable, please go to Apple.com and then click on Mac and see what Macbooks are priced higher, you know why Apple prices their devices higher or any company for that matter ?Performance / Features.
These new M1 Macs are not unbeatable dude, Macbooks running Intel are unbeatable because they compare with each other and not with Windows machines. Nothing is world class about this for many reasons
- Software is beta phase, there's no Adobe software ready as Apple M1 is just shipping to consumers but Adobe needs time to optimize, Office is announced but it runs slow due to Rosetta2, 32Bit x86 is dead with past Mac OS release, that puts many users who want a desktop OS, then ARM translation means this machine is not going to have a VM, it discarded Bootcamp. Then the OS ecosystem, Mac OS software is not equal to iOS, running iOS apps on mac is nothing ground breaking, iOS has gated filesystem vs Mac nope it is open, still leagues behind Windows and Linux, many normies are not going to mess with the Gateway to change the applicaiton installtion etc.
- Hardware, the Machine is costing over $1K+ and the RAM is 8GB, epic joke. And for SSD upgrade from 256 which is a joke at this price, is 200 bucks, and on top all is soldered. No one replace anything. Gaming performance is unknown at this point and Mac apps like SOTTR, BioShock needs to be updated for M1, then on top the Min spec for them is requiring a Dedicated GPU, so far AMD is not there, they are moving closer to their own ecosystem, there these games are not going to work. Geekbench is a shit benchmark, just hit GB4 scores on iPhones vs Android and then GB5 on the same and notice the difference with the SoCs on Apple vs Android, it's a worthless trash benchmark. The only viable is Cinebench R23 from Maxon. There ST is high but when we add SMT or here the BigLittle we do not know how perf scales, throttlng etc, since Mac Mini has fans while MBA the world class laptop doesn't, expect performance loss, no one can cheat physics. DIY repair is anyways dead on Macs since they removed the SSD and RAM, but with these and the Touchbar macs the KB is also sealed shut so is Battery heavily glued on.
Joe Guide - Friday, November 13, 2020 - link
You should read Paul Spector's assessment about where things stand. I think it is a fair analysis.https://componentplanet.wordpress.com/2020/11/13/b...
"By the same token, however, Apple’s marketing overreach on that stupid claim shouldn’t lull anyone into ignoring this chip. It represents the most potent threat to x86 dominance that I’ve seen in my entire career."
name99 - Friday, November 13, 2020 - link
Seriously?If an author can't tell the difference between 8 CPUs(+SMT) and 4 CPUs (+4 small) then he doesn't deserve my time.
NetMage - Saturday, November 14, 2020 - link
And if you can't tell the difference between Apple's low end passively cooled introductory chip, and what the future will bring, I think we know who's not worth any time.