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not seeing enough difference to spend the extra $50 to go with the base 13” MBP with less storage.
hoping the rumors on the 12” MacBook revival are right. That’s what I really want (unless they actually bring back the butterfly keyboard as rumored). A small portable and hopefully inexpensive laptop to supplement my Mac Mini.
possibly. or maybe they make a more "Pro" version of the Mini since they changed the color on this one back to silver.
Also not offering things like 10Gb ethernet.
AnandTech has a deep dive of sorts on the A14/M1 processor that I'm making my way through. The M1 is basically an A14X, just a more powerful version of the A14 in the iPhone 12 and iPad Air.
I found this bit from the article interesting
This year’s A14 chip includes the 8th generation in Apple’s 64-bit microarchitecture family that had been started off with the A7 and the Cyclone design. Over the years, Apple’s design cadence seems to have settled down around major bi-generation microarchitecture updates starting with the A7 chipset, with the A9, A11, A13 all showcasing major increases of their design complexity and microarchitectural width and depth.
They're on the tick tock CPU schedule like Intel (was?). So we won't the real good shit until the M2 hit which should have the next architecture redesign but still 5nm, that's probably when the Intel 16in MBP gets replaced with an M2X processor
In the overall SPEC2006 chart, the A14 is performing absolutely fantastic, taking the lead in absolute performance only falling short of AMD’s recent Ryzen 5000 series.
The fact that Apple is able to achieve this in a total device power consumption of 5W including the SoC, DRAM, and regulators, versus +21W (1185G7) and 49W (5950X) package power figures, without DRAM or regulation, is absolutely mind-blowing.
There’s been a lot of criticism about more common benchmark suites such as GeekBench, but frankly I've found these concerns or arguments to be quite unfounded. The only factual differences between workloads in SPEC and workloads in GB5 is that the latter has less outlier tests which are memory-heavy, meaning it’s more of a CPU benchmark whereas SPEC has more tendency towards CPU+DRAM.
The fact that Apple does well in both workloads is evidence that they have an extremely well-balanced microarchitecture, and that Apple Silicon will be able to scale up to “desktop workloads” in terms of performance without much issue.
Whilst in the past 5 years Intel has managed to increase their best single-thread performance by about 28%, Apple has managed to improve their designs by 198%, or 2.98x (let’s call it 3x) the performance of the Apple A9 of late 2015.
Apple’s performance trajectory and unquestioned execution over these years is what has made Apple Silicon a reality today. Anybody looking at the absurdness of that graph will realise that there simply was no other choice but for Apple to ditch Intel and x86 in favour of their own in-house microarchitecture – staying par for the course would have meant stagnation and worse consumer products.
The A14 pulls 5w power and only has 2 high performance cores (6 total) and yet it beats a 10900k with 10 cores and a 95w TDP.
WTF!
The M1 should be much better than the A14. This is wild, I'm gonna have to see lots of benchmarks and reviews to believe this. what's the catch?
But if it pans out I'll probably sell the Mac Mini i5 6-core 256GB 8GB I got last year and pick one of these up.
Last edited by #1 STUNNA; Nov 13, 2020 at 01:07 AM.
