Hector Martin

So it's clear they're not "10x better perf per watt" which is something I've seen thrown around a few days ago. But they're good. They are now competing with AMD, and Intel, well, haha good luck. (They totally had it coming.)

Since this is a completely different architecture, benchmark numbers are *not* comparable like they are across x86. The margin of error is much larger, because on top of µarch differences, you also have *compiler* differences and manual optimization for apps with hand-rolled asm.

So right now M1 wins on multithread Geekbench vs. a similar Ryzen, but loses on Cinebench, by significant margins either way. For any single benchmark, I would easily expect up to 50% noise in either direction at this stage. Don't try to extract more significant figures.

That said, it is somewhat reasonable to assume that M1 is likely to trend ahead as stuff is better optimized for ARM. But we don't know what kind of gains are yet to be had; some things might have reached peak already. So things will get interesting from here on.

Once we have more real-world app tests to use as comparisons, we'll have a better idea of how the *practical* performance of the M1 compares with the current x86 crop.

All this said, it looks like Apple has gone all-in on the "desktop experience". The really strong single-core perf (I wonder how much of that can be attributed to "x86 legacy garbage still has a cost"?), the awesome SSD, GPU, etc.

It's no wonder the M1 Macs are beating the pants off of the previous Intel offering there. But Intel has been *sucking badly* for years, and there are a pile of improvements other than the CPU.

As for Rosetta 2, it's good, but I'm still *really* curious how it'll do in the audio domain. We're talking lots of floating point processing with some integer mixed in, written by lots of different teams, some scalar, some vector, *definitely* a lot of it not well optimized.