Honest question. Why are people here so excited about this?
What I've gathered via osmosis here about Apple silicon is.
1. It will only be in macs, you cant buy the chips or mobos to build your own machine.
2. Theyre very energy efficient.
3. Their performance is okish.
Doesnt really seems earth shattering.. Like, if they were a super low energy alternative to the duopoly of amd or intel, that would be pretty cool.
But if u buy a mac nowadays, its like a console with set stuff in it that u cant change or upgrade.. Now that stuff will be improved / updated in newer macs, does that not happen regularly anyway?
EDIT:
Several people saying the performance is amazing.. Can u link me to some benchmarks? The only numbers I can find are these.
"In Geekbench 5, the A14X yields a single-core score of 1,634 and rakes in 7,220 in the multi-core test."
These are very low scores, like, my desktop gets many times that.. My old work low/mid level laptop from 4 years ago had 3000 single core and 11600 multi-core score.
> But if u buy a mac nowadays, its like a console with set stuff in it that u cant change or upgrade
That's how most people buy and treat computers. We're the weird ones who upgrade them and keep using them for 9 years, 3 SSDs, and 4 RAM bumps.
> Their performance is okish
Nope - not even close to merely 'okish'. These first devices (which were clearly targeted as the cheapest, lowest-end devices Apple sells) outperform the vast majority of PCs (and Macs) sold today, and not just by a tiny bit. Look at some of the reviews by developers - in many cases their existing Intel apps and games are running better under Rosetta emulation/bridge/whatever you want to call it then they did on native Intel Macs. Compile times for a $999 MacBook Air beat a $6k+ iMac Pro by 30-40%. Games getting better frame rates under Rosetta than they did on native intel boxes.
The list goes on - these chips are beasts, and this is only the beginning. The high-performance versions of these will make people who bought 8/10/12 core iMac Pros recently weep.
And it's an absolute IPC monster. At 3.2ghz it keeps up with high 4.x-ghz x86 cores. It's been a long time since anything's jumped like that from a good starting point.
From an software engineer's point of view, it is always exciting when new technology on market.
For example, I'm excited for Ruby on Rails on production when I was using PHP/Perl at that time. Also when I know how Kubenetes/Docker works after tired of Vmware ESXi.
This time a workable, non-x86 system on market, it has some new features that Intel don't have, that's why I'm excited.
It seems your are comparing geekbench numbers of different geekbench tests. Geekbench 4 would give much higher numbers.
As I understand it, the M1 has the highest single core result of all processors, and considering it only has 4 high performance cores, it has astonishing good multicore scores.
They’ve done a lot for the first time doing this. They’ve done a major transition and now have the freedom to innovate in the right direction for their product, not take what Intel gives them.
This launched strong out of the gate. I figure they will do even better in a generation or two.
What I've gathered via osmosis here about Apple silicon is. 1. It will only be in macs, you cant buy the chips or mobos to build your own machine. 2. Theyre very energy efficient. 3. Their performance is okish.
Doesnt really seems earth shattering.. Like, if they were a super low energy alternative to the duopoly of amd or intel, that would be pretty cool. But if u buy a mac nowadays, its like a console with set stuff in it that u cant change or upgrade.. Now that stuff will be improved / updated in newer macs, does that not happen regularly anyway?
EDIT: Several people saying the performance is amazing.. Can u link me to some benchmarks? The only numbers I can find are these. "In Geekbench 5, the A14X yields a single-core score of 1,634 and rakes in 7,220 in the multi-core test."
These are very low scores, like, my desktop gets many times that.. My old work low/mid level laptop from 4 years ago had 3000 single core and 11600 multi-core score.