What does it have to do with geekbench which test processors on max load, i.e., highest possible TDP, which I referred to?

Depends on how you look at it. What's impressive about the M1 is that it gets highly respectable Geekbench scores while also being able to deliver 20 hours of battery life in a small form factor laptop. If there is an Intel chip that can do that, where are the laptops with comparable battery life?

We can nerd out about the exact definition of TDP all day, but ultimately these benchmarks are only useful insofar as they tell us something about real world performance and power consumption.

Well, I hear a lot of claims that M1 is significantly outperforming Intel (either by raw computing power or per watt). All I saying that both are at level of maybe single generation improvement, nice but not revolutionary. Of course they also those low-power cores that allow long battery life, which is very nice, but thats a separate story

What do you mean "claims"? M1 has been out for a year. There are countless real-world demonstrations. Apple left Intel in the dust. Intel doesn't know how to make a cool mobile chip.

I mean that top Apple chip outperforms top Intel chip by 9% percent single core performance and 34% multicore on similar TDP. M1 is very energy efficient, and MBA is very cool cheap typewriter, but Apple hasn't outperformed Intel on high load.

So yeah, basically Apple has chip that slightly outperform Intel at high load and also can be very low power. Performance-wise (that what the parent message was about) the latter doesn't really matter.

>So yeah, basically Apple has chip that slightly outperform Intel at high load and also can be very low power.

This is what people are impressed by.

Given your 'typewriter' comment, you're clearly not interested in a lightweight laptop with decent performance and an extremely long battery life. But a lot of people are very interested in exactly this combination of features. And to be serious for a moment, the M1 Macbook Air has more than enough performance for the majority of people.

This is really an example of how Apple 'gets it'. Even if you're right that Intel is only slightly behind technically, they're way behind in terms of the overall product experience. You just can't make an M1 Macbook Air clone with any current Intel chip.

My OP talked exactly about claims (and there are many at least around me) of outperforming in terms of raw power.

I never argued with the fact that ARM allows to stick a couple of very low-power cores, while x86 doesn't.

In terms of "lightweight laptop with decent performance" MBP (the discussion is about new stuff after all) is less interesting, because it's heavier, more expensive, and probably doesn't provide much added value. M1 was revolution (mostly because someone took ARM and put in popular laptop and took the burden of software transition), those are much less so.

I can see myself getting MBA if I'll need something small and cheap and there won't be decent competition (maybe Google's Chromebooks? Or something from Samsung?), but not MBP (mostly because I dislike Apple's UX and I think competition is decent). I'd consider if it was say outperforming Intel by 50% in single core tasks.

> typewriter

Now that you mention, I remember my grandfather used to sit us around the fire and regale us with stories of how he used to edit 60fps 8k video on his old typewriter. I pulled it out of the attic just now and ran geekbench, and you're right, my new MBP is basically the same.

Thanks bud for bringing so much insight to this conversation!

I assume your grandfather wasn't able understand metaphors either?

Or sarcasm

Well the geekbench score didn't say anything about it being a revolution, that was your take. If Intel was capable of keeping their chips cool, while maintaining high perf, they would have been called a revolution too.