With Apple’s recent announcement of its newest Apple M1 chip, the Internet went insane. Not only were they dropping Intel, as a provider for CPUs for their Mac devices. They were entering a whole new market, with the CPU market being right now overtaken by AMD.
Talking about clock speed, the M1 chip has a base frequency of 3.2GHz compared to the 2.3GHz of the Intel Core i9 version. Apple’s M1 chip scored 1,687 on a single-core benchmark and claimed a multi-core score of 7,433. … The eight-core CPU also comes with four high-efficiency cores.
Specifications
When specs are concerned the Core i9 takes the upper hand. It has 8 cores and 16 threads and a boost clock speed of up to 5.10GHz. The M1 is based on ARM designs and features the big. LITTLE architecture, which has 4 energy-efficient cores to handle background tasks, and 4 high-performance cores, which handle the tasks that need full power.
CPU Benchmarks
We only have one test to go off of but from these results, we can say with certainty that the M1 is a serious competitor and should not be underestimated. It outperformed the Core i9 in Single-core benchmarks by 22% but lost in the Multi-core one by 19%.
| Geekbench 5 | Single-core | Multi-core |
|---|---|---|
| Apple M1 | 1687 (+22%) | 7433 |
| Intel Core i9-10980HK | 1376 | 8837 (+19%) |
 |  |  |
| Apple M1 | Intel Core i9-9900K | |
| 3.20 GHz | Frequency | 3.60 GHz |
| Turbo (1 Core) | 5.00 GHz | |
| Turbo (All Cores) | 4.70 GHz | |
| 8 | Cores | 8 |
| No | Hyperthreading | Yes |
| No | Overclocking ? | Yes |
| hybrid (big.LITTLE) | Core architecture | normal |
| Apple M1 (8 Core) | GPU | Intel UHD Graphics 630 |
| 3.20 GHz | GPU frequency | 0.35 GHz |
| GPU (Turbo) | 1.20 GHz | |
| 1 | GPU Generation | 9.5 |
| 5 nm | Technology | 14 nm |
| DirectX Version | 12 | |
| 3 | Max. displays | 3 |
| 128 | Execution units | 24 |
| Shader | 192 | |
| 8 GB | Max. GPU Memory | 64 GB |
| Decode / Encode | Codec h264 | Decode / Encode |
| Decode / Encode | Codec h265 / HEVC (8 bit) | Decode / Encode |
| Decode / Encode | Codec h265 / HEVC (10 bit) | Decode / Encode |
| Decode / Encode | Codec VP8 | Decode / Encode |
| Decode / Encode | Codec VP9 | Decode / Encode |
| Decode | Codec AV1 | No |
| Decode | Codec VC-1 | Decode |
| Decode | Codec AVC | Decode / Encode |
| Decode / Encode | Codec JPEG | Decode / Encode |
| M1 | Architecture | Coffee Lake Refresh |
| LPDDR4X-4266 | Memory | DDR4-2666 |
| 2 | Memory channels | 2 |
| 16 GB | Max. Memory | 128 GB |
| No | ECC | No |
| 16.00 MB | L2 Cache | |
| L3 Cache | 16.00 MB | |
| 4.0 | PCIe version | 3.0 |
| PCIe lanes | 16 | |
| 5 nm | Technology | 14 nm |
| ARMv8-A64 (64 bit) | Instruction set (ISA) | x86-64 (64 bit) |
| N/A | Socket | LGA 1151-2 |
| 15W | TDP (PL1) | 95W |
| Yes | AES-NI | Yes |
| None | Virtualization | VT-x, VT-x EPT, VT-d |
| Q4/2020 | Release date | Q4/2018 |
Conclusion
Apple has managed to pump out every last drop of performance from their new CPU. This coupled with MacOS’s great software optimization but makes this new chip a very scary competitor among other high-performance oriented CPUs. 22% increase in Single-core performance against a Core i9 is a fantastic base to build off of for the future. Yes, it lost in the Multi-core, but it still scored impressively high.
