Reviews show that Macs with Apple M1-soc are much faster than Intel variants

The MacBook Air, MacBook Pro 13 “and Mac mini with M1-soc have appeared. Reviews show that Apple’s own Arm chip is significantly faster than Intel processors that the company used before. AMD laptop CPUs are with all cores on work even faster.

According to AnandTech , the M1-soc’s four powerful Firestorm cores in the Mac mini run at 3.2GHz. The same cores are also in the A14-soc in the iPhone 12 series, but they work at a maximum of 3GHz. For the M1-soc, 3GHz is probably the maximum speed if all threads are put to work, AnandTech says.

In the singlethreaded benchmark of Cinebench R23, of which an Arm version has appeared, the Apple M1-soc scores 1522 points. That is almost equal to the score of Intel’s Core i7-1165G7, a Tiger Lake processor running at 4.7GHz. Only AMD’s Ryzen 9 5950X desktop processor achieves a higher score with 1647 points. That processor runs at 4.9 GHz.

AnandTech also compares the M1 version of the Mac mini to a Mac mini, MacBook Pro 13 “and 15” with Intel processors. The new variant with the Apple soc is in all cases significantly faster. The Intel versions do not exceed a thousand points. Even if the x86 variant of the benchmark is run via Rosetta2 emulation, the M1-soc is at least as fast as the Intel CPUs.

In the multicore benchmark, the Apple M1-soc wins with conviction over Intel laptop processors, which have up to four cores. Apple’s M1 chip has four efficient cores in addition to the four powerful cores. Only AMD’s Ryzen 7 4800U and Ryzen 9 4900HS are faster. These are laptop processors with eight powerful cores.

The octacore GPU of the M1-SOC performs much better than the integrated GPUs of AMD and Intel processors. In GFXBench and 3DMark the score is close to that of a GeForce GTX 1650 GPU and the Radeon 560X is surpassed.

In Rise of the Tomb Raider, the Apple GPU at 1366×768 pixels with medium settings has a frame rate of about 73 fps and with full-hd and very high settings that is almost 40 fps. This makes the GPU faster than a Radeon RX 560X. Incidentally, that game does not run natively on Arm, so emulation is still used with Rosetta2 for the CPU part. That emulation generally works smoothly, AnandTech describes. There is a loss of performance, but due to the good performance of the M1-soc, this is not a disadvantage in practice.

In its review, AnandTech also looks at power consumption. Idle, the Mac mini with M1 consumes about 4 watts. For single-threaded workloads, this is about 10 to 15 watts, depending on memory usage. The complete system consumes 31 watts with a heavy workload that puts all cores to work.

The Apple M1-soc is also in the MacBook Air and MacBook Pro 13 “, but the performance varies per device, depending on the cooling. The soc is actively cooled in the Mac mini and MacBook Pro, but there is no fan in the MacBook Air. . the Verge has three M1 devices compared and it shows that the MacBook Pro 13 “Mac mini and perform virtually the same. The MacBook Air is about 14 percent slower with all cores working in Cinebench. With an endurance test of 30 minutes, the difference increases to about 44 percent.

Several other sites have posted reviews of Apple devices with the M1-soc. TechRadar reviews the new MacBook Pro 13 ” and Engadget reviews the MacBook Air.