Apple M1 Pro Review: Is it really faster than Intel/AMD?

[Verne Arase]

Well, I suppose I could target the Windows on ARM laptop that Microsoft and Qualcomm have been collaborating on and install Linux on it. At least it's a start. If more people start doing this, then it could lead to the shift. Programming has to improve. 2 cores at 2.4 Ghz should be equal to 1 at 4.8 Ghz. The reliance on single thread performance in games is abysmal holding things back. More cores at lower speeds should mean more efficiency.

Actually, come to think of it Intel and AMD are not the best option for a competitor - it's ARM.

They produce the reference cores that both Qualcomm and AMD use - they just don't design high performance cores because their traditional market has been smartphones which are torn between medium performance and cost. They could probably be persuaded to attempt to produce high performance cores, but you'd haver to throw them a pretty lucrative bone to get them to concentrate on the PC side of things.

 

[Verne Arase]

Hmm. With all the instruction sets, it seems that one way to deal with the inefficiencies is to do away with the older ones or at least be able to disable the ones you're not using. At that point, x86 becomes a name and not a descriptor. Simplifying the work of the chips. Every new instruction set should be separate instead of encapsulating the old as well. Thereby making it easier to disable unused instruction sets. Just an idea.

When Apple first starting using ARM reference cores back in the early days of the iPhone, they were using ARMv7 (32 bit ARM).

Apple convinced ARM to produce ARMv8 (64 bit) which was much better, had a higher register count, and was capable of optimization.

A lot of ARMv7 instructions contained a condition code mask so you'd do something like a compare and execute an instruction if the result was equal. This conditional execution made it impossible to produce a wide processor because the pipeline couldn't predict what the result of the comparison would be.

So ... when ARM produced the ARMv8 ISA, Apple quickly adopted it, deprecated ARMv7, wrote ARMv7 code out of iOS, and removed the ARMv7 logic blocks from their processors - all in something like 2 or 3 years.

That's the kind of thing you can do when you own the whole stack.

 

[Yenega]

FTFY
The gains here are no more significant than a normal "tick or tock" release on any silicon. Apple just got their latest and greatest out of the lab a few months before INTELs next release. We see the same see saw in ATI / NVIDEA card releases.

It's hardly revolutionary or earthshattering as the review shows. It's a good processor; better in some cases, and not in some others.

In terms of performance per watt, yes it is.

This is because of Apple approch with big.LITTLE using ARM and hw decode/encode.

x86 will never come even close to ARM in this regard.

 

[imic9048]

All the reviews on these M1 mac's and nobody ever talks about all the issues with Rosetta. My company had to pull the M1's because they dont work friendly with developer tools not to mention the security stacks that most companies use are completely incompabitble with M1's.

Good luck with JAMF and other apple supported products. Freeze issues, applications not working, etc.

I am aware of quite a few companies struggling with M1's in their environment and one had to pull all of them and search for a way to buy them outside of Apple so they dont have M1's.

The M1 chipset has been nothing short of disastrous in the professional world. I recognize most personal use people would not experience some of this but as Apple tries to push into the corporate environment this has caused massive headaches.

Dang, didn't realise companies were having so many issues with the M1 chips.

I'm a developer at Shopify and we got M1 Max machines about a month ago and they've been exceptional. Our core app is a rails monolith and we use python, NGINX, MySQL, Kafka, React and and various other tools for DevOps (Git, docker, kubernetes...) and my colleagues and I haven't had any problems – well besides the 400 problems people send me a day to fix but they aren't MacOs specific

In fact, we've had some astounding compile times on the new machines and in some cases 2x more projects are being finished a day.. colleagues in marketing and content are reporting pumping out video content at impressive speeds, with render times also being cut in half..

We have some very fast windows workstations in the building that also make mince meat of similar workloads but since these M1 chips have come out, if you use a powerful pc notebook around people in the office you feel a bit like someone smoking cigarettes around other people... ha.. I'm serious though, no one really cared about fan noise all that much until we started getting fast and almost silent m1 machines but now you can really notice how loud our pc notebooks are compared to the macs, and in an office with people doing their best to find their flow, it's something we are all much more conscious of now.

Of course, I can't speak for all companies but thought I'd throw in my 2 cents from my experience. I do have friends at Twitter, Uber, Reddit and Cisco that use M1 Max work machines and they've all been impressed with the performance and haven't mentioned any issues with developer tools or their workflow but if I hear anything, I'll try and remember to come back and post.

Anyway, hope your company sorts out the computer issues because that doesn't sound like much fun at all.

cheers,

 

[Verne Arase]

All the reviews on these M1 mac's and nobody ever talks about all the issues with Rosetta. My company had to pull the M1's because they dont work friendly with developer tools not to mention the security stacks that most companies use are completely incompabitble with M1's.

Good luck with JAMF and other apple supported products. Freeze issues, applications not working, etc.

I am aware of quite a few companies struggling with M1's in their environment and one had to pull all of them and search for a way to buy them outside of Apple so they dont have M1's.

The M1 chipset has been nothing short of disastrous in the professional world. I recognize most personal use people would not experience some of this but as Apple tries to push into the corporate environment this has caused massive headaches.

I'd like to see some corroborative testimony from others having problems, and specifics as to what applications are not working. If this is as widespread as you say, others should be reporting on it.

I've just gotten an 2021 MacBook Pro 16 and have not had any problems.

Not saying you're wrong, but this smells like a sniping trolling attack.

 

[Danny101]

I'd like to see some corroborative testimony from others having problems, and specifics as to what applications are not working. If this is as widespread as you say, others should be reporting on it.

I've just gotten an 2021 MacBook Pro 16 and have not had any problems.

Not saying you're wrong, but this smells like a sniping trolling attack.

It kind of makes sense in the appeal factor. Microsoft core business has always been the corporate environment, whereas Apple was the end-user, content creators, and independent professionals. I don't disbelieve the claim on this premise. Still doesn't mean it's widespread and a disaster though. Some companies may still be trying to work through issues before giving up and saying anything. Which is a commendable trait these days. Apple's foray into the corporate space only helps serve to fuel competition, and that is a good thing. Still doesn't mean I'll ever switch to an Apple device. The threat that I might will suffice.

 

[Verne Arase]

It kind of makes sense in the appeal factor. Microsoft core business has always been the corporate environment, whereas Apple was the end-user, content creators, and independent professionals. I don't disbelieve the claim on this premise. Still doesn't mean it's widespread and a disaster though. Some companies may still be trying to work through issues before giving up and saying anything. Which is a commendable trait these days. Apple's foray into the corporate space only helps serve to fuel competition, and that is a good thing. Still doesn't mean I'll ever switch to an Apple device. The threat that I might will suffice.

Before I retired, they were converting Windows workstations to Linux based thin clients and web based enterprise services.

The C Suite and manager's offices had Apple computers, though that may have changed when we were acquired by a large Catholic healthcare conglomerate which was centered primarily around a Windows server base.

Of course a lot of infrastructure services aren't really something you can do with Windows, but even then they bought Linux based GUI application servers to do the grunt work. Seems like they wanted everything runnable by MCSEs (except backup and the main hospital system which ran on IBM POWER hardware).

 

[Verne Arase]

In terms of performance per watt, yes it is.

This is because of Apple approch with big.LITTLE using ARM and hw decode/encode.

x86 will never come even close to ARM in this regard.

The new Intel processors are using big.little, but they won't come close to Apple Silicon's efficiency.

The real reason for the performance boost is the singled core speed of the performance cores. You just can't design an eight wide x86 processor with a deep instruction queue because the variable length x86 instructions won't let the decoders guess where one instruction ends and the next begins. Guess wrong, and you have to flush the whole queue.

 

[lonetac]

I'd like to see some corroborative testimony from others having problems, and specifics as to what applications are not working. If this is as widespread as you say, others should be reporting on it.

I've just gotten an 2021 MacBook Pro 16 and have not had any problems.

Not saying you're wrong, but this smells like a sniping trolling attack.

I posted links to the mcafee websites detailing the issue and even saying not to upgrade to Big Sur if you are using a M1 but it the post was removed either because techspot is censoring people detailing issues with the M1 or because the posthad a link in it. Either way I cant share it here but its rather easy to find documented on McAfee's website.

If you want an M1 and have McAfee in your environment, you just have to use an OS that is 2 versions behind the current.

If you want I can share the link via PM.

 

[lonetac]

Dang, didn't realise companies were having so many issues with the M1 chips.

I'm a developer at Shopify and we got M1 Max machines about a month ago and they've been exceptional. Our core app is a rails monolith and we use python, NGINX, MySQL, Kafka, React and and various other tools for DevOps (Git, docker, kubernetes...) and my colleagues and I haven't had any problems – well besides the 400 problems people send me a day to fix but they aren't MacOs specific

In fact, we've had some astounding compile times on the new machines and in some cases 2x more projects are being finished a day.. colleagues in marketing and content are reporting pumping out video content at impressive speeds, with render times also being cut in half..

We have some very fast windows workstations in the building that also make mince meat of similar workloads but since these M1 chips have come out, if you use a powerful pc notebook around people in the office you feel a bit like someone smoking cigarettes around other people... ha.. I'm serious though, no one really cared about fan noise all that much until we started getting fast and almost silent m1 machines but now you can really notice how loud our pc notebooks are compared to the macs, and in an office with people doing their best to find their flow, it's something we are all much more conscious of now.

Of course, I can't speak for all companies but thought I'd throw in my 2 cents from my experience. I do have friends at Twitter, Uber, Reddit and Cisco that use M1 Max work machines and they've all been impressed with the performance and haven't mentioned any issues with developer tools or their workflow but if I hear anything, I'll try and remember to come back and post.

Anyway, hope your company sorts out the computer issues because that doesn't sound like much fun at all.

cheers,

For some reason my last few posts have been censored by techspot without explanation.

Let me try again. Our issues seemed to stem from using JAMF. Apple dev support confirmed a bug with JAMF and M1 mac's.

This comes straight from Apple dev support so there isnt any refuting it but if you are not running JAMF or McAfee you probably will not experience the issues we are seeing.

Things have gotten better but McAfee still causing issues with Big Sur and M1's as detailed on their website advising users using MCP to not update to the new OS or Big Sur. So you are running old vulnerable OS's.

Pretty sure our company is the one that highlighted this issue.

Home users will absolutely never see this issue, this is 100% a corporate environment issue. Most ppl think their mac's are immune to infections and in the non-corporate world you wouldnt be using things like cloud proxies, DLP, etc. This means our situation turns out to be unique as the vendors creating products for apple in the corporate environment are struggling to make things work and play nice.

If you use JAMF and McAfee, I would not believe someone telling me there are no issues if they have an M1 mac.