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Comment by PragmaticPulp | Hacker News Reader

In the real world, there aren't many people making purchasing decision between an M1 Apple laptop or Mac Mini and an AMD 5800X desktop machine anyway. Still interesting to see the comparisons.

The leaked Geekbench results of AMD's upcoming 5800H laptop parts are about 85% of the M1's single core score and matching the M1's multi-core score. TDP is still higher than the M1, obviously, but AMD is also using a 7nm process while Apple got the jump on 5nm by buying exclusivity on TMSC's 5nm process through the end of the year.

I'm extremely impressed with the M1 and I'll be buying an Apple Silicon device as soon as they have something with 32GB or more of RAM. However, the sentiment that the M1 chip obliterates any and every desktop part on the market is getting kind of silly at this point.

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However, the sentiment that the M1 chip obliterates any and every desktop part on the market is getting kind of silly at this point.

1. Nobody ever stated that. If anything, it was all of the Intel and AMD users who created that straw man. "See, it's slower than a 64-core Threadripper at 280 watts". No kidding.

2. The M1 is clearly not a desktop-class SoC nor was it intended to be. However, it's more than competitive with many desktop x86 processors that run faster and hotter while consuming much more power.

3. As a first attempt, the M1’s performance per watt is very impressive. Obviously the 5nm process helps but it's never one thing with Apple: it's the unified memory, the 8 instruction decoders (AMD and Intel max out at 4), and the integration of the 16-core Neural Engine, among other features.

>1. Nobody ever stated that.

Oh hell no. If you read through 10K comments sine M1 launch on HN alone, majority of them are stating exactly that. ( Which is rather annoying )

That why you see quite a few of these new benchmarks blog post trying to provide a balanced view.

> the unified memory

Castrated by a paltry 8GB of RAM in stock configuration!

Castrated by a paltry 8GB of RAM in stock configuration!

Probably not.

macOS has had RAM compression since 2009; by now, it's probably implemented in the M1 SoC, so it's really really fast.

8 GB on an M1 is closer to 16 GB on most other processor/operating system combinations.

That's amazing. I usually read in 16 GB of image data into memory for analysis. I'm guessing that will work fine on the 8GB ram macbook then. /s

Look, it doesn't have to work for everyone. Of course there are workloads where it's not going to be enough. That's fine. My personal workload requires 128GB of ram but I don't go around telling people 8GB laptops are pointless.

I don't think that's the point they were trying to make. I think they were saying that just because the OS has RAM compression doesn't mean it's like doubling the RAM on other operating systems, and that's even before you consider that those other operating systems have RAM compression too. Saying something is like having 16 GB of RAM when you can't actually use it as 16 GB of RAM deserves to be called out.

Linux and Windows have ram compression too.

It's helpful, but it's nowhere near doubling your memory. Especially when you have an SSD to swap inactive data to, the benefit of compression is equivalent to adding something like 0-2GB of RAM.

Let’s not forget that the M1 is the budget (for Apple), low performance SoC. Let’s see what the M1X is like mid next year.

Also M2 is going to be for the mid-range 14/16" MacBook Pro + iMac.

You will need to wait for the M3 in 2022 for the true desktop HEDT/Threadripper competitor.

It’s not like AMD is going to be standing still for the next few years though

> In the real world, there aren't many people making purchasing decision between an M1 Apple laptop or Mac Mini and an AMD 5800X desktop machine anyway

I have a 15 inch 2018 i9 MBP that's objectively a terrible device (throttling/keyboard).

With corona and WFH I'm weighing my options - right now everything is out of stock but early next year I'd be interested in building a desktop. My problem is the M1 is so good that if they do a 8 performance cores version for 16 inch MBP in spring there would literally be no point in having a desktop - I could have a single device that outperforms the desktop machine. Frankly I don't see why they couldn't offer a 13 inch varian with more cores - thermals are not a constraint.

Has there been any leak that a 16 inch MBP with Apple Silicon is coming anytime soon? Haven't heard any substantial info on roadmap.

Does Apple ever announce anything before the day it happens? This is the company that drops iOS, macOS, and M1 on developers the day they do the public.

I'm not sure where people are pulling all these Apple silicon timelines from, but I can guess :)

There’s not been leaks, but there’s no reason to believe that it won’t be coming any time soon. Hypothetically the latest it would come out is in first half of 2022, but I’d be surprised if it took that long for the 16 inch macbook pro.

Some are making a "desktop with cheaper terminal laptop -vs- pro laptop" choice though. And in that case the comparison may matter.

Thing is M1 air is cheap for the quality/performance so you could probably get both.

Depends. If you go for the base model, yes. If you need more memory or a lot of fast storage or gobs of GPU horsepower or a lot of I/O, the 5800X will be definitely cheaper by a mile.

That being said, at the same config, the 5800X system would indeed only barely be cheaper.

I need lots of harddrives and pcie slots for my type of work. No matter how fast the M1 is, I'd rather use i3-10100 instead.

Sure, but this article helps answering "do I need both".

Absolutely, the M1 is extremely impressive and the best performer in its class by a long shot.

Yep it's probably the first at this size and packaging that you can just hook up to a TV and replace a decent desktop computer with (like I did; goodbye late 2015 iMac 5K...).

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