Is 900GFlops of GPU compute supposed to be impressive?
Context is everything. Certainly compared to the same benchmark on the non-M1 hardware as presented by the author, yes.
In general this is a very specific test of multiple technologies and whether it is relevant or meaningful is certainly up for debate but if you take it on face value of the number being presented it is either impressive or not impressive based on what you are comparing it to.
I think the very specific parameters of the test here make the result largely arbitrary and irrelevant to an end-user when you consider that WebGPU isn't currently relevant to users.
Outside of the test and more generally the M1 delivers incredible performance relative to it's power consumption which I think is what is truly impressive about it.
Personally I hope one day Apple will finally give up on trying to make a hard stance about keeping the Mac/iOS devices separate and just give the damn things a touch screen. I know they would prefer that I own both a Mac and an iPad but it's really absurd when the only thing separating them now is touch input.
Some of the recent integrated AMD graphics are modestly capable but are also part of a 35w or higher TDP packages.
Looking beyond this arbitrary test, results like these: https://www.anandtech.com/show/16252/mac-mini-apple-m1-teste... are incredible for Rise of the Tomb Raider on those settings with that power consumption.
It should be compared to integrated graphics because that is what is is both competing against and running circles around in performance, and what it is on-par with (better actually) in power consumption.
Also note that it is not correct to compare CPU+GPU power draw in other systems, as in M1 macbooks the power budget is shared between CPU and GPU which leads to throttling.
Also, if you really want to get pedantic, the most powerful integrated graphics are much more powerful than the M1. They are just not ported to laptops, because it makes no sense since you can get much more performance at better power consumptions with dual integrated/discrete GPUs and switching.
The M1 performance is incredibly impressive in relation to the power it takes to do it. This is relevant and meaningful to a user of this type of device and allows fantastic battery life even under heavy load which is unmatched by other devices in its class.
Yes it isn't the most performant, but it is the most efficient and it also isn't a slouch. I think that is impressive. That is all.
There are laptops with discrete GPUs that have similar battery life in those workloads where the M1 gets 20h.
There is no improvement to user experience. This is trying to spin a closed platform that is not compatible with discrete GPUs as somehow a good thing.
Just FYI. The M1 GPU consumes 0-30% less than the Xavier NX series GPUs, which are the next comparable thing, and delivers a third of the performance. It's way behind in every way to Volta or rDNA. A spade should be called a spade - it's a sub-par product due to Apple making closed, non-standard systems, with worse performance than it could have had.
It really sounds like you have an axe to grind against Apple. It's okay to both criticize Apple for certain aspects of it's products at the same time as respecting/praising others.
I think Apple makes great mobile hardware but they also sell aluminum caster wheels for the mac pro that costs $200 more than the price I paid for my iPhone SE 2. This is stupid and makes no rational sense. I have 0 desire to own a traditional mac because the price is absurd compared to more capable products and I don't care about paying the Apple tax to look cool. The M1 Macs are actually a compelling hardware offering.
They are much better than what Macs used to be. That makes them middling. There is no real performance advantage of M1 Macs - least of all in GPU performance - over the current AMD/NVidia standard, and quite a few disadvantages.
What it really is, is Apple making their own processors to be able to lock down their Mac platform really harshly and have total control over it, without offering any performance advantage over their competition, and people spinning it as actually a good thing because Apple had the good sense of making their previous generation of laptops worse than it had to be to make modern hardware feel revolutionary.
Which means they're integrated graphics.
> Also note that it is not correct to compare CPU+GPU power draw in other systems, as in M1 macbooks the power budget is shared between CPU and GPU which leads to throttling.
Just like integrated GPUs?
> it makes no sense since you can get much more performance at better power consumptions with dual integrated/discrete GPUs and switching.
This has not been my experience with hybrid graphics in the slightest.
As for battery life, any 10-15W Ryzen 5000 series processor with discrete graphics mostly disabled will do it.