The MetaReviewer

To read between the lines of the pubished reviews. To see through the marketing claims.

[The MetaReviewer @MetaReviewer]

Should AMD and Intel be worried? No. The x86 architecture can handle a lot of complex instruction sets that isn't just possible with the ARM based M1. Apple Silicon, no matter how better it gets, won't be a threat to x86, at least in the near future.

[The MetaReviewer @MetaReviewer]

Apple M1 thread

[The MetaReviewer @MetaReviewer]

Running iPhone and iPad apps natively is no surprise as the hardware is basically the same. However, the lack of a touch screen doesn't make a very good case for the usability.

[The MetaReviewer @MetaReviewer]

The M1 is an excellent chip, though it falls short of Apple's tall claims even in carefully chosen workloads.

[The MetaReviewer @MetaReviewer]

What I hate is that Apple has locked out of measuring the clock speeds, power usage and temperatures. Hope that it is made available in future updates.

[The MetaReviewer @MetaReviewer]

Battery life seems to have improved over the previous generations, though not up to the claims unless tested under ideal conditions.

[The MetaReviewer @MetaReviewer]

Things get interesting on the GPU side too. The GPU performs dangerously close the GTX 1050, which is very impressive considering the low CPU+GPU power envelope.

[The MetaReviewer @MetaReviewer]

Having said that, the M1 is a very efficient and powerful chip. I'll be happy to see the M1 benchmarked with a standard test suite after a few months when the platform is more mature with more native programs/benchmarks.

[The MetaReviewer @MetaReviewer]

The M1 is hence not even the most powerful 15W chip, let alone being the most powerful chip.

[The MetaReviewer @MetaReviewer]

But here we are. Extrapolating the data available, it can be inferred that the 4th generation AMD Ryzen U chips can perform around 1.2-1.5x (with a few outliers) of the M1 while still within the 15W limit.

[The MetaReviewer @MetaReviewer]

Going through reviews, I see that benchmarks and even the competing hardware seem to have been cherry picked to highlight the advantage of the M1 chip.