back to article Can a 21.5-inch iMac beat the latest-and-greatest M1 model in performance? Kinda

The benchmarks don't lie. Apple Silicon is fast. The M1 processor outperforms Intel’s competing i5 and i7 chips in virtually every metric you would care to mention, from CPU performance to graphics rendering. With that in mind, one may ask why anyone would want to buy an x86 Mac. But as YouTuber Luke Miani recently showed, if …

  1. fedoraman
    Go

    But...

    But will it run Crysis?

    1. kevin king

      Re: But...

      Yeah https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SFUBalGW7Zo

  2. RachelG

    Leopards...

    It's even worse than you said: Leopard was the last PowerPC MacOS X. Snow Leopard was Intel-only. (The Intel switch happened during the Tiger period.) My first and last G4 Mac Mini got an upgrade to Leopard, and after that it was a Linux box. (Which I sold only a couple of years ago for actual money, which was shocking, I thought...)

    That said, the Mac OS X release cycle then was every *two* years, not every year. So the first Intel iMac arrived in 2006 and the first Intel-only Mac OS X was 2009. The same gap equates to two or three more MacOS releases for Intel, which doesn't sound *quite* so bad...

    1. chivo243 Silver badge

      Re: Leopards...

      There was a 10.6.7 PPC beta or dev build that didn't see the light of day...

      https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/snow-leopard-on-unsupported-ppc-machines.2232031/

    2. deadlockvictim

      Re: Leopards...

      If you have a use/grá for software that ran on the macs up to Mac OS 9, then the mac mini makes a super Mac OS 9 machine.

      1. W.S.Gosset

        Re: Leopards...

        Fun Fact: Mac OS 9 is a cut-down version of 8.6.

    3. DS999 Silver badge

      Re: Leopards...

      The PPC Macs had a smaller market share than x86 Macs, and Apple had a lot fewer resources back then so a faster schedule to put supporting two architectures made more sense then.

      Apple announced iOS 15 today and the iPhone 6S first sold in 2015 will still be supported, so they are going back six years there. Devices going back to the iPhone 5S in 2013 still get security updates to their last supported OS, iOS 12, so that support goes back eight years and counting.

      I can't see them orphaning x86 Macs at any faster pace than they orphan older iPhones.

  3. trevorde Silver badge

    iMac FTW

    At least you can install Windows (or Linux) and run some decent software

    1. Jason Hindle

      Re: Now that would be an interesting race

      Linux on Parallels*, on an M1 Mac, vs Linux on bare metal, on an Intel based Mac. Windows under ARM is still work in progress so wouldn't be a fair comparison.

      * Which runs up in seconds BTW.

  4. Ace2 Silver badge

    Developer support

    “Particularly when it came to things like web browsers…”

    Actually there’s some guy who’s only just now announced the end of his Firefox-for-PPC project. It takes days to build a browser, even on a G5.

  5. Fazal Majid

    Probably has to do with RAM

    My M1 MacBook Air with 16GB RAM smokes my i9-9700K with 64GB RAM, and significantly faster on single-core and nearly as fast on multi-core with my i9-9900K (those are 95W CPUs, not 6W like the i9-9900 non-K).

    https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/compare/1826503?baseline=6428909

    https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/compare/2117078?baseline=6428909

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Probably has to do with RAM

      The Apple M1 looks like it uses 4266MHz DDR4LPX, whereas the 9700K only supports 2666MHz DDR4, although I'm not sure it makes much of a difference on the Intel side - looking at the reviews for Skylake, there's a negligible difference between 2933MHz and 3800MHz in the benchmarks.

      FYI, the i7-11700 is ~40% faster than the i9-9900K in the Blender benchmark, although it's pretty power-hungry (260W vs 180W for the i9-9900K)

  6. deadlockvictim

    This has happened before

    The PPC/Intel switch has been mentioned above.

    Back in 1994 when Apple brought out the first PowerMacs, they were generally faster running (emulated) 68K code, but not always. Some software was faster on the 33MHz (Quadra 950 & 650) or 40MHzs (Quadra 840AV) 68040s than the same software was on the new PPCs. Now, to be sure, the same versions of code written in PPC code were much faster on PPCs than the 68K code on 68K macs.

    Nowadays, these end of the line 68K macs are more valuable than the macs succeeded them and I expect that the end-of-the-line Intel-macs will become quite pricey (as secondhand macs go) in the recent future.

    1. DS999 Silver badge

      Re: This has happened before

      Apple has always migrated to faster CPUs, which make it easy to convince the userbase to move. If there was no benefit, they won't WANT to move they'll have no choice when the ones with the older CPUs are no longer sold.

      It also helps incent developers to port, as they know their customers will be eager to migrate so they need to get the port done or risk losing them to a competing application.

      This is probably why Microsoft's support of alternative architectures for Windows has never worked. The only architecture that offered a performance boost was Alpha - and that was only for large scale servers and that advantage was short lived since full support on Windows Server arrived about the same time as the future Alpha products were killed after HP bought Compaq.

    2. W.S.Gosset

      Re: This has happened before

      Likewise the last of the G5 Macs.

      There's a bobble in the pattern there, though: the market reaction to the new Intel machines was to hoover up every single G5. Apple, surprised, on the back foot, pumped out a coupla more models after the declared End of Line.

      The last Dual G5 is NOT as good as the planned-to-be-last-but-now-second-last Dual G5. By a fair margin.

      Problem, though, was detecting which you were looking at. From memory, the only real "visible" giveaway was a subtle distinction in L3 cache.

  7. acousticm

    Aunt Agatha benchmark

    I wonder if anyone ever did the Aunt Agatha benchmark on these ?

    That is, measure the time it takes to:

    * power up the machine

    * log in

    * open your favorit word processor

    * type

    Dear Aunt Agath,

    thank you very much for the sweater you sent me for Xmas. Every time I wear it I am reminded of you.

    Love

    your nephew Oswald

    * save the document

    * print the document

    Surprisingly enough, it's very, very hard to beat an XT with 2 3.5" floppies running DOS and WP 4.2 on this one.

    [German magazine C'T did this a decade or so ago, using almost all machines they could get their hands on.

    Though they had a different name for the test ]

    1. doublelayer Silver badge

      Re: Aunt Agatha benchmark

      The largest chunk of time in that challenge is probably the boot time plus any delay in finding the word processor in the UI. If we used a device without the features of modern computers to cut the boot time, we would probably beat the XT because saving on a floppy is slow.

  8. bazza Silver badge

    AVX?

    I've had a reasonably good rummage around, but have been unable to find anything definitive about whether or not the M1 silicon has the equivalent of Intel AVX. Anyone out there know?

    Little tidbits like this article suggests not. I don't know if Blender uses AVX or not. Given how Rosetta is supposed to work you'd think that a statically translated Blender would, if the M1 silicon were up to it, be at least comparable to running on Intel hardware, but it wasn't. So perhaps Blender does use AVX, and perhaps M1 is rubbish in that department.

    AVX512 is a seriously chunky piece of kit. I know that similar SIMDs are bolted to ARMs (Fujitsu do for their latest supercomputer), but I don't know if Apple has bothered to or not.

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