AMD's upcoming Ryzen 7 5800H - on par with Apple's M1?
[16:20 Wed,16.December 2020 by Rudi Schmidts]
Apple actually managed to pull off a powerful PR coup a month ago with the introduction of its new ARM architecture. Not only many specialist media but also many not so tech-savvy media spread the word that Apple's new Macs would show virtually every PC the back of the envelope. Some video users were also in a great mood to have it all, and the benchmarks showed one thing clearly:
An ARM Mac is very fast if it can decode the video clips used with its special hardware codecs and then get very optimised video effects such as colour correction to do. However, when it comes to more complex video effects, it is still beaten by almost every dedicated GPU. In addition, Apple can of course plan one or two optimisations in the operating system specifically for its processors, which is why praise for the overall system is certainly justified.
However, when it comes to truly comparable computing power, what we already suspected a month ago now seems to be true: the upcoming AMD mobile processors will be on a par with the M1.
This is what Twitter user APISAK, who has always been right in the past, wants to prove. He has made it his hobby to search the Geekbench database for unusual entries. This time he came across a mobile Ryzen 7 5800H in an Acer Nitro AN515-45 notebook, which actually delivers benchmark values that are very close to Apple's M1.
Specifically, it lists 1475 as the single core score and 7630 as the multi-core score. Now, mind you, this is only a single value pair sample, while there are already almost 21,000 entries of Apple's M1. Good M1 Geekbench scores fluctuate around 1700 (single) and 7600 (multi).
This would put the upcoming AMD Ryzen 7 5800H just 15 percent behind the M1 in the single score benchmark and on par in the multi-code benchmark. Of course, the upcoming AMD notebooks, which will probably be presented at CES at the beginning of next year, will consume slightly more power than the very economical M1 models from Apple. However, this is due to the fact that Apple can already have its processors manufactured in 5nm at TSMC, while AMD will continue to manufacture in 7nm until 2022.
The first Geekbench figures thus prove one thing above all. That AMD is still not as far behind Apple in terms of performance as some media have portrayed in the past. Users usually don't even notice a performance difference of 15 per cent at most in practice. And with AMD, laptops can even still be configured with a dedicated GPU for video editing.
And Intel? You shouldn't write them off in this race either. Because their new mobile Tigerlake CPUs (such as the Intel Core i7-1165G7) also reach browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&q=1165G7 in Geekbench (single scores up to 1600 and multicore scores up to 5700.) And that even with only 4 cores and hyperthreading. Intel's 8-core notebook Tigerlake chips will also be presented at the beginning of 2021. However, the latter are likely to be conspicuous for their very high power consumption and, like the current Tiger Lakes, will be poorly available from the outset because the yield of Intel's 10nm process is still quite poor.
;)