This really explains where most of Apples advantage comes from, any processor is a combination of Power vs Performance vs Area (silicon used) and Apple have basically said fuck-it and spent $$$ on Area so they have the best power vs performance, while using the latest node to assist and absorb the cost into the products price.
You could literally produce 5 of AMD’s 58XX/59XX mobile APUS (10.7b transistors) for less silicon than a single M1 Max (57b transistors). Or a Ryzen 5950X (19.5b) and nVidia RTX 3080 Ti (28.3b) for less transistors. It’s unlikely much further expansion can be done on a monolithic die as well.
As a consumer, this is an excellent product, with incredibly tight integration. If the same number of transistors and process node were used by Apple’s competition, I would a significant proportion of the performance and power advantage Apple has would disappear.
Do you think metal cycle will support hybrid rendering? Or the XPU thing? Somehow utilisingboth cpu and gpu? I guess that would perform very well with the 10 core cpu
i hope an alpha build of 3.1 with metal support pops up in the next month or so. i don’t want to make any purchase decisions based on future promises (got burned with apple promoting vr support and then letting it drop a year later)… but my goodness this laptop feels like everything i’ve wanted
Are those Intel and AMD cpus destktop class right?
Because then this continues to be beyond mind-blowing… here’s a 8-core high performance section of the M1 Pro/Max having practically the same scores as some older 10-core and current gen 8-core CPUs with 2x or 3x or whoknowsX the power draw.
I do emphasize the cores and how close they are, because:
14970 v ~15000 is just 0.2% difference
I see these machines as 8-core with extra help: the 2 extra efficiency cores are really just that, efficiency, they pack some punch but they are there to take care of whatever could hog the system with minor annoying things that add up: copying files, the installd doing it’s thing, maybe time machine backup, who knows what else.
Ok, hadn’t seen this one. This is an important remark… not quite far away then for quite affordable laptops on the CPU side.
It’s still the rest too though, the screen (except if the notch is a no go for some), easy connectivity with anything apple (iPads, AirPods, keyboards/mice, etc), the battery life and as you mention, to be determined but optimistic, whatever the metal scores are going to show
I think that is amazing for a notebook.
