Apple M1 + Benchmarks
This processor is impressive.
After jumping in to test a Mac for my parents, I finally gave in an bought a new MacBook Air with the new M1 processor.
I like the keyboard and I’m glad I skipped the butterfly keyboard fiasco, but I’m still trying to overcome muscle memory with ctrl+backspace to delete a whole word. And I miss an actual “delete”, and not a renamed backspace to delete. But I do realize that this is a laptop keyboard too.
Sleep/Waking is butter smooth and very reliable. After getting used to an iPad’s instant and reliable sleep/waking, I really notice the failures on my employer issued laptop when it doesn’t work 100% of the time. Or my home-built machine whose sleeping recently started to cause BSOD’s.
The whole package is quite slick, and the longer I’m in this sysadmin game, the more I appreciate not having to mess around with my home equipment.
I bought a second-generation iBook G3 almost 20 years ago and I ended up selling it because I had no use for it. Now, my home-built gaming rig can’t run Windows 11 (no TPM 2.0) and my gaming time has dropped significantly in the past year, so I will try and keep this as my daily driver.
Here are some quick and dirty benchmarks of my own workflows for the Apple M1.
Diablo III
Let’s be honest here, the M1 is still integrated graphics, but would it still be playable? In a pinch, maybe, but I doubt it would work for very long. I didn’t test any rifts and I’m not going to bother.
| Apple M1 | i7-4790k + 1070 |
| ~50 fps in town with graphics turned way down. | 100+ fps |
Factorio
I didn’t have a megabase to test Factorio, but the biggest base I had was buttery smooth with everything turned up and rendering in native resolution.
| Apple M1 | i7-4790k + 1070 |
| 60/60 fps/ups | 60/60 fps/ups |
Handbrake 1.4.0
What is so amazing is that this MacBook Air is passively cooled and is probably thermally throttling itself on these encodes. I’m really curious as to the Handbrake performance of an actively cooled M1 in the Mac Mini and more excited to see what the M2 will be like.
| Apple M1 | i7-4790K | (2x) E5-2680 v2 | |
| x2641 (480p) | 72 fps | 51.9 fps (+28%) | 62.9 fps (+13%) |
| x264 (1080p) | 9.75 fps (+50%) | 7.7 fps (+61%) | 19.64 fps |
| x2652 (480p) | 28.54 fps (+7.5%) | 30.84 fps | 23.26 fps (+25%) |
| x265 (1080p) | 4.69 fps (+37%) | 4.59 fps (+39%) | 7.47 fps |
(The percentages are the increase in encoding time.)
Unfortunately, I’m not encoding x264 SD video anymore, but I’d move to this full time if I was.
