>I mean that's kind of expected if you compare a low-power CPU with fewer cores against an unlimited-cooling desktop monster with much more cores.
Are we looking at the same charts here? For cinebench multithreaded, the AMD 4xxx series CPUs are zen 2 parts with 15/35W TDP, hardly "unlimited-cooling desktop monster" like you described.
From the article: "While AMD’s Zen3 still holds the leads in several workloads, we need to remind ourselves that this comes at a great cost in power consumption in the +49W range while the Apple M1 here is using 7-8W total device active power."
Looking through the benchmarks, the zen 2 parts generally seem to have lower performance than the M1. The cinebench multithreaded benchmark is one exception. It's not that surprising because the 4800U has more cores than the M1 has high performance cores. The M1 wins the single threaded cinebench benchmark.
The Zen2 4800HS also outperformed the M1 in the Specint2017 multi-threaded results, too.
The M1's float results are weirdly good relative to the int results, though. Not sure why Apple seems to have prioritized that so much in this category of CPU.
Taking a loop and adding a bunch of `x|0` can also often boost performance by hinting that integers are fine (in fact, the JIT is free to do this anyway if detects that it can).
The most recent spec is also adding BigInt. Additionally, integer typed arrays have existed since the 1.0 release in 2011 (I believe they were even seeing work as early as 2006 or so with canvas3D).
It's a higher TDP part (I think - it's 35W) and has more high performance cores, so it's not surprising that it would win some of the multicore benchmarks.
In single core performance, yes, but as the next page on the article shows, it's more comparable to the 4900HS, AMDs mobile CPU in multithreaded performance.
I guess we're talking at cross purposes. I was just making the point that the 4900HS isn't really a competitor to the M1 because it's in a different TDP class. It looks like Apple wanted to stick with one chip for their first generation products, but they could presumably at least throw in a few extra cores if they had another 10-15W to play with.
Well no, but then again there is the 4800S at half the TDP that gets close in single core performance and wins in multicore performance, so there pretty much no way they could've beaten it at another power budget.
Indeed, it they were to add a few more cores to their M1, then AMD could have also thrown a few more cores in their 4800, and it would have been a wash.
I mean that's kind of expected if you compare a low-power CPU with fewer cores against an unlimited-cooling desktop monster with much more cores.
The M1 will likely be an amazing laptop chip, but still unusable for demanding desktop work, e.g. CGI.