M1 MacBook Air vs. Intel MacBook Air | Hacker News Reader

M1 MacBook Air vs. Intel MacBook Air

youtube.com

30 pointstosh7 comments

I love that he does the thermal performance, a 5 C drop on idle temperature is exactly what I was hoping for. The previous gen intels were toasters.

This is one of the best real-world performance comparisons between the M1 and Intel system I've seen so far

This will be hard to answer, but how much of this comes down to CPU architecture, how much is SoC vs discrete components, how much is Intel lagging on 10nm, and what would this look like with a laptop Ryzen chip? Or the latest Snapdragon?

Also, how much of the Intel performance was kneecapped by Apple's insufficient cooling? On a laptop with the same Intel chip, but with a proper cooling system that doesn't peg the CPU to 100C instantly, I bet a lot of the performance gap would vanish.

Of course that doesn't take away the M1's superiority, just that the performance measurement is meaningless when the Intel CPU is constantly throttling at 100C.

That's a great question. I've got a hackmac with an i9-9900k that needs some optimizing. It was hitting 100C frequently until I changed some overclock settings, that's been remediated but I still haven't had a chance to optimize it. It appears most of the tools for measuring OC settings and benchmarking are PC-only, so that requires throwing up a Windows install alongside Mac OS - which I've done.

Dual-booting required disconnecting all other hard-drives to install Windows onto a new drive. Which is a ridiculous requirement and not even related to Mac or hackintoshing, but to the Windows installers inability to install in the presence of any drives with bootable EFI partitions – I think.

Off topic, but yeah, buy real Macs unless you have a lot of time to devote to fixing problems. Most of the time it's flawless. Upgrading and special cases are fun.

I'd really like to see how the M1 compares to my current setup in my real world use.

>On a laptop with the same Intel chip, but with a proper cooling system that doesn't peg the CPU to 100C instantly, I bet a lot of the performance gap would vanish.

On the other hand the M1 doesn't even have a fan, so there's that...

Incredible Intel gets kicked in the balls so hard by a fanless design. I'm thinking because Apple probably eats a bit more of the cost than Intel can it might make sense to test against perhaps a $100+ more expensive Intel chip.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com