58 PCWorld FEBRUARY 2021REVIEWS TESTED: APPLE M1 CHIP
for the Slim 7 laptop with its Ryzen 7 4800U.
The 11th-gen Tiger Lake chip also easily runs
its 14nm sibling in older Prestige 14 off the
field.
And yes, the MacBook Pro M1 performs
the worst of all of the laptops here. We’re
talking about 1 minute for the 11th-gen Intel
chip in the MSI Prestige 14 Evo versus just
under 5 minutes for the MacBook Pro M1.
That’s for just a single image, too.
Gigapixel AI also supports discrete
graphics, which actually helps the Zephyrus
14 and Predator Triton 500 stay in the game.
But even with their much faster discrete GPUs
they’re still significantly slower than the 11th
Tiger Lake chip.
In the past, AMD would throw it back in
our face by saying that such specialty apps are
used by far, far fewer people than even 3D
modelling or a video encoder. We suspect
Apple fans would say the same thing—and
imply that once Gigapixel AI is updated to
support the MacBook M1 and its own
inference engines, the M1 will far better.
In a perfect world, yes, but we really don’t
know if or how long that will take. We should
also point out this is a real application being
used by an untold number of photographers
and digital artists.APPLE M1 ROSETTA 2 COST
There have been plenty measurements of the
translation cost needed to make x86 apps run
on the MacBook M1, but we wanted to takeMSI Prestige 14 (4-core Core i7-1185G7) Performance AC
Apple MacBook Pro 13 (8-core M1) Default ACCinebench R20
Non-Native Binary On
Apple M1 vs. Cinebench
R23 Native Binary
SecondsNative Cinebench R23 1TSingle-render time
Translated Cinebench R20 1TSingle-render time
Native Cinebench nTSingle-render time
Translated Cinebench nTSingle-render time128
106528527738497147127SHORTER BARS INDICATE BETTER PERFORMANCEyet another stab it. For that we decided to use
Cinebench R23 and Cinebench R20. As we
said earlier, R20 is native to Intel-based Macs,
while Cinebench R23 is not. Cinebench R20
bases its score on a single render, while
Cinebench R32 bases it on multiple renders
by default. To see if they compare, we timed
how long it takes to run a single render in
both versions. On the Windows version, it’s
within the margin of stop watch error on the
MSI Prestige 14 Evo. That’s not the case with
the M1.
Keep in mind when you look at the chart
above that the shorter bar indicates higher
performance as we’re looking at how long it
takes to render the scene.
Since both versions render what appears
to be exact same frame, we can see the