> I just can't figure out what I'm missing on the "M1 is so fast" side of things.
Two reasons:
1. M1 is a super fast laptop chip. It provides mid-range desktop performance in a laptop form factor with mostly fanless operation. No matter how you look at it, that's impressive.
2. Apple really dragged their feet on updating the old Intel Macs before the transition. People in the Mac world (excluding hackintosh) were stuck on relatively outdated x86-64 CPUs. Compared to those older CPUs, the M1 Max is a huge leap forward. Compared to modern AMD mobile parts, it's still faster but not by leaps and bounds.
But I agree that the M1 hype may be getting a little out of hand. It's fast and super power efficient, but it's mostly on par with mid-range 8-core AMD desktop CPUs from 2020. Even AMD's top mobile CPU isn't that far behind the M1 Max in Geekbench scores.
I'm very excited to get my M1 Max in a few weeks. But if these early Geekbench results are accurate, it's going to be about half as fast as my AMD desktop in code compilation (see Clang results in the detailed score breakdown). That's still mightily impressive from a low-power laptop! But I think some of the rhetoric about the M1 Max blowing away desktop CPUs is getting a little ahead of the reality.
Two reasons:
1. M1 is a super fast laptop chip. It provides mid-range desktop performance in a laptop form factor with mostly fanless operation. No matter how you look at it, that's impressive.
2. Apple really dragged their feet on updating the old Intel Macs before the transition. People in the Mac world (excluding hackintosh) were stuck on relatively outdated x86-64 CPUs. Compared to those older CPUs, the M1 Max is a huge leap forward. Compared to modern AMD mobile parts, it's still faster but not by leaps and bounds.
But I agree that the M1 hype may be getting a little out of hand. It's fast and super power efficient, but it's mostly on par with mid-range 8-core AMD desktop CPUs from 2020. Even AMD's top mobile CPU isn't that far behind the M1 Max in Geekbench scores.
I'm very excited to get my M1 Max in a few weeks. But if these early Geekbench results are accurate, it's going to be about half as fast as my AMD desktop in code compilation (see Clang results in the detailed score breakdown). That's still mightily impressive from a low-power laptop! But I think some of the rhetoric about the M1 Max blowing away desktop CPUs is getting a little ahead of the reality.