At yesterday’s event, Apple dedicated itself solely to the new ARM Macs and emphasized the high performance of the M1 chip, which will be used in the MacBook Air, MacBook Pro (13 inch) and Mac mini in the future. According to an analysis by AnandTech, Apple’s M1 may actually be the fastest laptop CPU currently available.
More performance with significantly less energy consumption
The report is based, among other things, on findings from the A14 chip already available in the iPhone 12. AnandTech calls Apple’s new ARM chip the “A14X for Macs” – a more powerful variant. In the absence of M1 Macs already available, the report compares the performance reserves of the A14 chip with x86 chips from Intel and AMD. The A14 mostly overtakes the Intel competition in the SPECfp benchmark. Apple’s chip is far ahead in SPEC2006 and only has to admit defeat by AMD’s Ryzen 5000 series.
The performance of the A14 SoC is almost “unbelievable”, since Apple’s A-Chip is now not only able to keep up with the best processors in the x86 segment, but can also overtake them for the most part – and with significantly lower power consumption. While the Intel Core i7 (1185G7, 21 watts) and AMD Ryzen 5950X (49 watts) considered in the test require significantly more energy without integrated DRAM and other components, Apple’s A14 including DRAM and other SoC components only needs 5 watts. Since the M1 has more cores and performance than the A14 chip, the gap to the Intel camp should grow again.
Intel stagnates – Apple’s A-chips are passing by
In addition, the speed of development of Apple in recent years is impressive. While Intel was only able to increase the best single-thread performance of its own processors in the past five years by 28 percent, the same value for Apple’s A-SoCs improved by 198 percent in the same period. In AnandTech’s graphics, Apple has already left Intel behind in terms of performance. According to the analysis, in view of the increasing performance gap, Apple had no choice but to switch from Intel to its own A-chips. In view of the good performance of the A14 chip, the report is excited to see what leaps in performance Apple will make in future ARM desktop computers.