Well, processors, plural, as we’ll see.Īs you might expect, the Intel-supplied benchmarks showed Intel on top, sometimes outperforming M1 by ratios of 3:1 or even 6:1. And those results were… also pretty good! Then Intel itself weighed in with a very Apple-specific presentation comparing M1 against its own Core i7 processor. It was equally inevitable that x86 partisans would benchmark equivalent Intel processors. A home run, then? A big technological win for Apple? Maybe… maybe not. And the results were… pretty good! The M1 seems fast and it appears to deliver good battery life. But better how? Was the Cupertino company simply looking to save money? To reduce power consumption? Improve performance? Gain control over its CPU roadmap? All of the above?Īs soon as M1-based Macs went on sale, people started benchmarking them.
What, exactly, are you measuring? Computers do different things differently, so deciding what to measure is just as important – if not more so – than the actual measurements.Īpple clearly felt that designing its own ARM-based chips was better than buying Intel’s x86-based processors. Drag racing a couple of CPUs seems easy, but once you get into it you realize it’s fraught with problems.
It’s natural to try to find out which chip is “better,” for some definition of better. You’ll see what you want to see in the benchmark results, and what you take out of the scores is, as Yoda says, “only what you take with you.”Ĭomputer benchmarking, like auto racing, has been around ever since they made the second one. Spoiler alert! It’s a trick question – a Rorschach test. Which chip is faster: Apple’s M1 or Intel’s Core i7? The new or the old? ARM or x86? The mobile gadgets company or the major microprocessor maker?
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