This article fails to clearly mention that Adobe CC is the x86 version running under Rosetta 2 translation on the MacBooks. It's going to perform significantly better once the native Apple Silicon versions are available.
Given the source of the article, the author might just have a vested interest in making their own systems look good compared to the Macs?
>I wonder if, given the source of the article, the author might just have a vested interest in making their own systems look good compared to the Macs?
I don't think they succeeded. The Apple LAPTOPS held up really well against the optimized relatively high end desktops. Every advantage (price, size, cooling, software, architecture maturity) was on the side of the desktop and they are only twice as fast. That's a pretty slim gap.
Did we read the same article? It seems to explicitly mention that:
"These units only cost around $1,500 as configured, however, so the fact that they are half the performance shouldn't be unexpected since they are also half the cost. What will be very interesting to see is how performance will shake out as Adobe improves support for native Apple Silicon and when (or if) Apple launches a higher-end laptop - or even better, a more powerful desktop variant than the Mac Mini."
"Another way to look at it is that these new MacBooks (and presumably the Mac Mini) are roughly equivalent to a desktop that is around 4-5 years old. So if you have a PC from 2015 or 2016, be aware that these MacBooks likely won't be any faster."
Lots of hand waving at the end. Did this fictional PC also cost $4k 4-5 years ago?
I'm a fan of both PCs and Macs. Just way too much marketing and not enough substance here. Someone wanted their SEO juice from a blog article and they got it.
And you're right, it's not even native binaries. They really should've showed how fast image processing in Photoshop on the iPad was compared to Wintel.
Actually they do clarify that they are not comparing similarly priced systems. But yes, that could have been made more obvious.
Also they compare the apple silicon performances to older systems as well, to have a better comparison point. But again, they could have made a (much) better job of displaying the data.
And still, indeed, Rosettta2 is in the way, so that's no real result here.
It's just not even close to an apples-to-oranges comparison. Not only is it Rosetta2 but it's also Mac vs Windows binaries. They couldn't add in another variable to make it more different if they tried.
But if you were to build/buy a "AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3960X", I would check their numbers on geekbench.com. It seems like there's a lot of builds with the same specs and better numbers than even this. For the amount of money they're asking of a desktop, I'll check these numbers elsewhere.
I am pretty sure that Adobe products make heavy use SIMD/SSE/AVX extensions to speed up any image processing that is not offloaded to the GPU - I wonder how well Rosetta 2 translates the vectorized instructions. If not well, then the M1 is really in for a treat.
That said, it doesn't seem hard to do and I wouldn't be surprised if most instructions have near 1:1 equivalents. The only question is if Rosetta 2 authors got around to translating those.
Yea, I’ve heard the M1 has features to make JS compilation super fast.
For photoshopped I have no idea of which of the micro benchmarks have the most predictive ability for Photoshop performance. If it’s mostly memcpy, Rosetta2 is nearly as fast at that as native. But if it’s a lot of math we could see some substantial speed ups from the native Photoshop.
Did you read the WHOLE article? They specifically note that these systems ARE good value for money as-is.
I’m not sold on these yet, but at least read the entire analysis. These 10-25w machines are matching 4-5 year old desktops, or running the same $/performance as current machines in their metric.
I use Adobe and 3D software in my work and I'm actually disgusted how poorly Creative Suite uses the power I'm providing it with.
So much of it is still single core constrained for no good reason, After Effects can't scrub the timeline smoothly or play without dropping audio anymore, I swear this didn't use to be an issue 10 years ago. Even more insulting because all of AE is deterministic so could be multithreaded if it had been built correctly or if they really wanted to put the effort in, but why put the effort in when everyone already has to pay you anyway.
Actually surprised the M1 isn't matching these systems (even under emulation) for the reasons I outline above. But my experience with the Adobe suite is really it spends more time choking over it's own incompetence rather than being limited by the hardware anymore, when you fire up some software like OctaneRender on the same workstation it's crazy seeing what your machine is actually capable of and makes you wonder what an AE or Photoshop built for modern hardware would look like.
Please scroll all the way down before commenting; they note that these are half the price of their current offerings and rank about even on a price/performance basis.
Not sure why this got flagged, it is one of the few real-world performance tests comparing the M1 to non-Mac workstations.
The author's might be biased because they actually sell the systems the Macs get compared to but they don't hide that fact from the reader and to me it makes the results even more trustworthy. If you are interested in M1 performance beyond superficial comparisons I think it is worth a read.
If the point of this is to show the price/performance ratio isn't that far off, okay. However, that isn't super clear, and most readers will see the graphs and conclude the M1 is garbage.
This just feels like yet another apples-to-oranges comparison. Of course the systems with dedicated, bleeding-edge graphics cards (and 4x RAM) are going to nuke the M1 in this regard.
Given the source of the article, the author might just have a vested interest in making their own systems look good compared to the Macs?