from Hacker News

Apple M1 – a seriously fast x86 competitor

by tikej on 11/23/20, 9:01 AM with 113 comments

• by neilsense on 11/23/20, 11:46 AM

  Have been waiting for years for an ARM-based laptop, I wouldn't have ever thought that the x86 emulation would be this good though.

  Apple seriously deserves huge credit for this, after both Microsoft and Google were screwing around on arm for years doing nothing useful.

  I do hope both Microsoft and Google come out with competitors, though, because it'll help the market massively.

• by ekr on 11/23/20, 1:36 PM

  I'm personally both impressed and surprised by how well this M1 chip performs. But one thing most reviews omit to mention is that it has a fab process advantage compared to the competitors, especially against Intel. And going from TSMC 7nm (which is the latest line of AMD CPUs are using) to 5nm can bring a few tens of percentage points in power consumption and/or performance improvement.

  This of course doesn't take anything away from the design, as clearly Apple has had a hefty lead against other smartphone SoC designers in the smartphone space for years.

• by bni on 11/23/20, 12:05 PM

  How many years will it take before an Apple competitor can make an ARM ISA SoC that is anywhere near "x86-64 high end" performance? Is anyone trying currently?

• by craigkerstiens on 11/23/20, 9:25 PM

  We ran some benchmarks for it on Postgres, and well the results seem pretty in line that it's some impressive performance - https://info.crunchydata.com/blog/postgresql-benchmarks-appl...

• by post_break on 11/23/20, 3:39 PM

  I ordered a MacBook Pro. I haven’t bought a Mac computer since 2012. This computer has the same feeling of the original core duo MacBook I got. Right during a transition and that thing was a work horse. I plan to use this machine just as much and I’m just as excited as I was getting that MacBook as my first Mac.

• by overcast on 11/23/20, 2:24 PM

  Just need VM Fusion to catch up, a 16" MacBook Pro with more than 16GB of RAM, and I'm in!

• by akmittal on 11/23/20, 3:31 PM

  With this I'm more excited about ARM on servers.

  Microsoft and Google already have ARM machines but were not much successful. I thinks Apples success would convince them to be more serious and put more resources on ARM. ARM on server would mean even cheaper cloud prices (or more performance for same price)

• by ramijames on 11/23/20, 3:43 PM

  I would love to be a fly on the wall at Intel.

• by woahAcademia on 11/23/20, 2:47 PM

  How does this work in practice? You wipe the OS and install Linux or Windows?

  I'm not really kidding, any steps into Apple's ecosystem is dangerous given their poor track record on Customer Service, Privacy, hardware costs, hardware quality, security, and I'm going to stop and get back to work.

  There are bigger problems to be solved, I don't think 1 expensive computer is going to change anything.

• by absolutelyrad on 11/23/20, 12:42 PM

  When intel manages to get fab process for 5nm ready, the performance (single core) will be significantly higher then ARM due to Intel's superior architecture. They're going to figure out a way, don't count them out yet.

  I'd long Intel, it is over sold.