52 PCWorld FEBRUARY 2021REVIEWS TESTED: APPLE M1 CHIP
with more limited cooling. It’s actually called a
“throttle test” which is a different method
than before for Cinebench.
None of this bothers Apple’s M1 much
though. Based on TSMC’s most advanced
5nm process, it’s a stone cold killer, with
Macworld reporting no fan noise at all during
the run. That can’t be said of the x86 laptops,
which all vary from fairly quiet to a little
rackety.
The performance is impressive though,
with the eight-core M1 Mac now ahead of the
four-core 11th-gen Tiger Lake as well as the
older six-core Core i7-10710U. But if you give
Intel’s older six-core more thermal head room
it’s almost dead even with the silent M1. An
eight-core variant of an Intel H-chip would be
even faster obviously.
AMD, however, just shrugs at all this and
yawns as its eight-core Ryzen 4000 chips
easily beat all comers when set to their
performance modes.
Single-threaded performance probably
matters more for what most people do and
the M1 doesn’t disappoint there either.
Neither does Intel’s Core i7-1185G7, to be
fair. Its single-threaded prowess has pushed
aside Ryzen 4000 and you see that here
where both the M1 and the Core i7-1185G7
are basically tied in Cinebench R23. There’s
some conjecture that “we’re just not testing
x86 right” as Usman Pirzada argues at
WCCFtech (go.pcworld.com/uman).
However, Joel Hruska at Extremetech (go.pcworld.com/xtch; who worked on the
results with Usman) argues the ball is really
back in Intel and AMD’s court for how to
address the limitations.
The main take away is the single-threaded
performance on the M1 as well as Intel’s Tiger
Lake is nothing to dismiss.
But as we said, there is indeed a cost to
be had for when you run every CPU core that
hard on a laptop. Cinebench R23 allows you
to actually turn off the “Throttle Test,” so we
did that to record scores of Cinebench R23’s
multi-core benchmark in a more traditional
single render scene. Laptops that can benefit
from only running full tilt for three minutes
versus more than 10 minutes get a decent 6 to
8 percent boost. The Ryzen 4000 laptops
actually open up their performance gapCinebench R23
Single Run nT
Multi-threaded performance
Asus Zephyrus G148-core Ryzen 4800HS (Default AC)
Lenovo Slim 78-core Ryzen 4800U (Default AC)
Lenovo Slim 78-core Ryzen 4800U (Performance AC)
Apple MacBook Pro 138-core M1 (Default AC)
MSI Prestige 144-core Core i7-1185G7 (Default AC)
MSI Prestige 144-core Core i7-1185G7 (Performance AC)
MSI Prestige 146-core Core i7-10710U (Default AC)
MSI Prestige 146-core Core i7-10710U (Performance AC)
Acer Predator Triton 5006-core Core i7-10750H (Default AC)LONGER BARS INDICATE BETTER PERFORMANCE10,6066,20710,2894,1179,0956,4057, 7 7 37, 4 0 55,991