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Comment by teilo | Hacker News Reader

And overnight, Intel's Ice Lake is again way behind.

Ice Lake shipped in 2019. The current generation is Alder Lake, which is slightly ahead of the M1 in single-threaded performance according to most benchmarks.

And massively behind in terms of power consuption

Yes, certainly. I don't think that's relevant in this case, though. Why would anyone care if their workstation CPU draws 60W or 200W? It's easy to cool in either case and the power consumption is trivial.

M1 is clearly the best design on the market for mobile devices and is merely very good for desktops. Let's keep the enthusiasm realistic.

You say it's easy to cool but that's actually not the case, for anybody that cares about noise. Any music studio is going to happily take the 60W over 200W because they record and monitor music and need the quietest machine possible in the room.

Unsurprisingly, it's called Mac Studio, as in music studio, or art studio, or what have you studio, where these things matter.

This is a machine aimed at content creators.

Higher power means more cooling, which usually means more noise. A lot of people find value in quieter machines.

>Why would anyone care if their workstation CPU draws 60W or 200W?

I care. I work from home and my main power sink is my desktop. Considering the soaring energy prices these days I really do care about what my usage is.

Its behind M1 but it's worth pointing out that Alder Lake is not a power-hog on "normal" workloads i.e. gaming when compared to it's other X86 competitors. It only starts cooking itself on extremely heavy workloads.

My bad. I meant Alder Lake.

80% of the desktop market and 100% of cloud deployments won't care.

Would 80% of "the desktop market"—whatever that means—care about Ice Lake to begin with, or any high end chip at all?

What they definitely won't care is Apple hardware at Apple prices, specially outside first world countries.

Ya but they never have, and it seems a bit irrelevant in the context of this particular product. I'd see that being relevant if it was supposed to be a product with extremely broad appeal, but it isn't that even for first world countries.

It it relevant in the context that people keep celebrating M1 as if Apple would take over the whole computing world.

I dunno, I think cloud is starting to think more and more about power consumption of the chips used, where Apple Silicon blows the competition out of the water.

Let us know when Apple starts a cloud business.

Desktop will care about noise of the fans.

Data centers are also pretty conscious of power consumption, more power means more cooling infra required and higher energy bill, while it is not the top priority it certainly is a significant factor in decision making.

Buying M1 chips from Apple isn't happening.

Not chips, servers. Apple has sold those before.

You mean the commercial failure of A/UX and X Server?

Good luck with those against Linux/FreeBSD workloads.

The point is they have experience, not they were good at it, unlike with selling chips.

There are plenty of applications M1 is really good at, if Apple wanted to get into this space they could target , for example render farms.

If you're going to be smug why not use a recent Intel chip?

PC user don't pay 4k for a computer, on PC you can get 2x the speed for 2x less the price.

Link me to the $2K computer that's twice as fast as the M1 Ultra. Take all the time you need.

> Take all the time you need

Check your replies in 10 years and I'll be able to list a dozen ;P

But sarcasm aside yeah this chip looks insane.

It took less than 6month to have a faster amd / intel CPU than the m1 back then, Apple charts are showing performance / watt which for a desktop PC is kind of irrelevant. In pure speed amd / intel are faster or will be very soon.

For graphic card I don't try to argue because fps on Mac are very inferior in games than a average modern card. It's not even on the same league.

> For graphic card I don't try to argue because fps on Mac are very inferior in games than a average modern card. It's not even on the same league.

The M1 is as fast as the 1650. I'm getting great frame rates at 1440P High on X-Plane

> It took less than 6month to have a faster amd / intel CPU than the m1 back then, Apple charts are showing performance / watt which for a desktop PC is kind of irrelevant. In pure speed amd / intel are faster or will be very soon.

Perf/Watt is very relevant. Electricity costs money and you also want a cool room.

> PC user don't pay 4k for a computer

I'm almost certain that's not true, especially for machines that would compete with the Studio

> on PC you can get 2x the speed for 2x less the price.

Citation needed. This hasn't been true for a long time as far as I can tell.

May I ask the $2000 desktop configuration with 2x the speed?

Of course Apple chips won’t work well for gaming, but what other benchmarks will this $2000 desktop win?

This hasn't been true since M1's release

A CPU like the 5900x is better than the m1 and cost 400$.

That's one part of the equation though, not to mention it's a desktop chip. I can get a laptop with an M1 Max with hours of battery life running full tilt.

Your $400 CPU needs at least another $1000 in parts just to boot (and those aren't even the parts you likely want to pair with it).

Your cost comparison is silly. Nobody compares singular CPUs to entire machines.

People seem to think that the M1 is the ubber thing in term of performance which is not, it's great on many aspect, especially termal / perf per watt etc ... but for many it's a PC sitting bellow your desk it's less relevant. For laptop it's a different story.

I own one and it's worse because I had to go and read random forum guides to learn about undervolting so Windows would stop turning the fan on and off constantly.

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