There is nothing inherently superior about the x86 architecture which suggests it should stay ahead performance-wise for

But the performance results are ticking in from all corners of the world. They tell a story which makes it ever harder to persist in these sorts of claims with a straight face.,A frequent argument by PC diehards in response to impressive benchmarks was that “well… these are just synthetic benchmarks and not real applications.” That excuse does not carry much weight anymore either. We have started seeing a string of tests of real world applications and they are equally impressive.,The M1 is not just a CPU, but an SoC with many specialized components bringing dramatic performance improvements in many specialized tasks, such as image and video editing and decoding.,It would be very surprising if the Intel to ARM transition was less smooth than PowerPC to Intel. After all Apple has years of experience with ARM through iPad and iPhone which runs very similar software. iOS is really just a flavor of macOS. The libraries, tools, programming languages and everything else is very similar. Going from developing Mac software to iOS software was not a big transition. At isapplesiliconready.com we can keep up to date on what software has currently been ported to Apple Silicon.,It will be interesting to watch in the next weeks or months as benchmarks for the new Macs pop up. There will be a lot of surprised people. But don’t worry people will still dismiss Apple. They will complain about 16 GB RAM being too little for professionals and that the number for ports are too few (which annoys me too). Sure we would all like the option of more RAM and ports. But that does not change the exceptional advancement Apple has been making with Apple Silicon over the years.,I went through the PowerPC to Intel transition and I got to say that went surprisingly smooth. But it is important to keep in mind what your expectations are. As a software developer I know how hard this kind of things is. If you expect absolutely everything to work flawlessly from day one, then your experience will be different. I have seen people describe the PowerPC to Intel transition as hell, but that tends to be people with a rather naive view of what a transition entails. Day one can be rough if you use a wide variety of non-Apple software, but the point is that things improved rapidly.,Many will be happy to know that important applications for professionals such as Adobe Photoshop and MS Office has already been ported. Other professional tools such as Affinity Designer, Photo and Publisher have also been ported.,A lot has happened since those days. Software for the Mac is to a larger extent developed in Xcode, we got more software distributed as LLVM bitcode. Software simply is not as tied to an architecture as strongly as when the PowerPC to Intel transition happened.,Countless software companies already have both an iOS and a macOS version of their software. They naturally use a lot of code sharing. With SwiftUI they are getting close to merging the iOS and macOS world.,Some people will cling to the fact that AMD still has a performance edge, but for how long? AMD had a much smaller gap to close to surpass Intel in performance. Apple had a much faster progression. The ARM world is simply moving a lot faster and x86 is living on borrowed time.,In fact the M1 is so fast that the Rosetta 2 performance hit is small enough that many users of upgrading from Intel Macs will still experience increased performance despite running apps which have not yet been ported.,Especially as a junior dev, I sometimes felt under pressure to make use of fancy new components and libraries that would wow my colleagues. But this leads to overthinking and will affect your current tasks and potentially those in the future if you take too long and eat into sprint time.,In short these 10W delivers a lot more functionality than the 65W AMD Ryzen delivers. This also underscores how Apple’s tactic differs from the competition. Apple prefers to offload a lot of specialized tasks with high performance demands to custom silicon. That is easy for them to do because they have full vertical integration. E.g. you don’t use the Neural Engine directly, but through Apple frameworks such as Core ML.,The last desperate attempt at saving face has been to insist that the M1 is useless anyway because most apps will have to run through Rosetta 2 and that will give terrible performance. One PC die-hard told me you could easily expect a 5x performance drop from this. Yet the benchmarks we now got suggests this is a desperate dystopian fantasy among Apple haters:,16-core Neural Engine. Which make machine learning tasks such as image and text recognition, various video and photo editing tasks up to 15x faster by Apple’s claims. Previous claims about Neural Engine by Apple has been independently verified.