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Since Apple’s announcement of the two-year transition period from Intel x86 to ‘Apple Silicon’, Arm-based processing analysts and tech enthusiasts have been eager to see Apple’s first switch machines. Apple’s extraordinary claims, but vague performance comparisons at the ‘One More Thing’ launch event, didn’t really help inform. And we’ve seen some good and bad indicative leaks of Apple’s M1 SoC performance in the run-up to the availability of the first Apple Silicon Mac computers.
Yesterday afternoon the first professional reviews began to be published on the web and on social media platforms to help us get a clear idea of the capabilities of the M1 SoCs and the first trio of Macs built with these processors. I have looked at five ‘pro’ sources to see the terrain configuration; On the web I have reflected on the reviews of companies such as Anandtech, Ars Technica and Engadget, and for the social media reviews I saw the videos posted by Marques Brownlee and Dave Lee. Unfortunately we don’t have a Mac M1 on HEXUS HQ at the moment.
All of the reviews share a positive picture of the hardware’s capabilities, but for prospective buyers the overall advice is that if you don’t need a new Mac right now, you’d best wait for the third-party app support to mature and any new. platform bugs that need to be resolved. However, the performance advancements on these first-gen Apple Silicon machines were very apparent (even though they’re mostly entry-level Macs) and the jump in battery life is welcome for laptops.
While there are Macs that use HEXUS readers, of course, many will be far more interested in the performance of the M1 hardware than whether these are good machines to buy as upgrades to existing Apple computers. Therefore, I have concentrated on collecting some PC comparison benchmarks from the sources listed above.
First, above you will find three charts; Cinebench R23 single-core, Cinebench 23 multi-core, and Parallel GZip compression test. Add to this information that the new M1 notebooks have greatly improved battery life using batteries of the same capacity as their predecessors.
After the leaks, it’s good to see the above M1 calculation confirmed. However, as a SoC there are other important things to consider, such as the performance of the integrated GPU. Ars tested the performance of the new M1 GPU against recent iPads, iPhones, and the Asus ROG Phone, but thankfully Anandtech took a much closer look at this aspect of the M1 SoC using benchmarks like GFXBench Aztec, 3DMark IceStorm, and even Rise of the Tomb Raider, which was released in 2016 and is a “proper Mac port” with a built-in landmark.
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Of these graphics benchmarks, what interested me the most was to see the new Mac Mini hit an average of 73fps at 768p and medium settings without AA in ROTR. If you chose a very high 1080p setting with FXAA applied, the average frame rate dropped to 40fps. Under gaming load, the entire package drew just 16.5W. Remember that ROTR is of course a non-native Apple Silicon application that uses the Rosetta 2 translation layer.
