The M1 is designed from the ground up to be powerful and rather compromise-free competition for traditional PC architecture. But ARM has been coming for the desktop space as well, albeit more slowly-and mostly on the very low end, as we've seen in devices such as the Pinebook Pro.Īpple's new M1 system-on-a-chip (SoC) is decidedly not one of those low-performance, low-cost efforts. In these form factors, performance-and the ability to run a familiar operating system and software stack, with zero compromise-has been the most important criterion. From there, ARM began encroaching on the datacenter, and for the same reasons-even though individual ARM processors generally underperformed their x86 equivalents, they got the same amount of work done with lower power and cooling bills necessary.ĭesktop and traditional laptop PCs are something of a last bastion for the x86-64 architecture.
That power efficiency advantage led ARM to an early and crushing victory in the ultramobile space-phones and tablets-where milliwatts saved matter more than raw performance. Getting down and nerdy-pigz parallel compressionĪRM architecture generally has a substantial power-efficiency advantage over x86-64-the architecture underlying traditional Windows, Linux, and macOS machines.Similarly, you can beat the M1's GPU with high-end Nvidia or Radeon desktop cards-but only at a massive disparity in power, physical size, and heat. Although it's extremely difficult to get accurate Apples-to-non-Apples benchmarks on this new architecture, I feel confident in saying that this truly is a world-leading design-you can get faster raw CPU performance, but only on power-is-no-object desktop or server CPUs. In addition to the eight CPU cores, the version of the M1 in the Mac mini has eight GPU cores, with a total of 128 Execution Units. The idea is that user-focused foreground tasks, which demand low latency, will be run on the performance cores-but less latency-sensitive background tasks can run slower and lower on the four less-powerful but less power-consumptive efficiency cores. The M1's CPU is a 5nm octa-core big/little design, with four performance cores and four efficiency cores. Instead, we're going to take a closer look at the raw performance of the new M1 in comparison to more traditional x86 systems. This is not one of those reviews-though reviews are coming imminently for some of the new Macs.
And we've got traditional reviews of those devices and their ecosystems, for Apple fans and the Apple-curious. Further Reading macOS 11.0 Big Sur: The Ars Technica review Original story 9:00am EST: There's a lot of understandable excitement around Apple's ARM-powered devices right now.
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