The Apple M1 is a System on a Chip (SoC) from Apple that is found in the late 2020 MacBook Air, MacBook Pro 13, and Mac Mini. It offers 8 cores divided in four performance cores and four power-efficiency cores. The big cores offer 192 KB instruction cache, 128 KB data cache, and 12 MB shared L2 cache. According to Apple the performance of these cores should be better than anything on the market (in late 2020). The four efficiency cores are a lot smaller and offer only 128 KB instruction cache, 64 KB data cache, and 4 MB shared cache. The efficiency cores (E cluster) clock with 600 - 2064 MHz, the performance cores (P cluster) with 600 - 3204 MHz.
The M1 is available in two TDP variants, a passive cooled 10 Watt variant for the MacBook Air and an active cooled faster variant for the MacBook Pro 13 and Mac Mini. Those should offer a better-sustained performance according to Apple.
The integrated graphics card in the M1 offers 8 cores (7 cores in the entry MacBook Air) and a peak performance of 2.6 teraflops. Apple claims that it is faster than any other iGPU at the time of announcement.
Furthermore, the SoC integrates a fast 16 core neural engine with a peak performance of 11 TOPS (for AI hardware acceleration), a secure enclave (e.g., for encryption), a unified memory architecture, Thunderbolt / USB 4 controller, an ISP, and media de- and encoders.
The Apple M1 includes 16 billion transistors (up from the 10 billion of the A12Z Bionic and therefore double the amount of a Tiger Lake-U chip like the i7-1185G7) and is manufactured in 5nm at TSMC.
The AMD Ryzen 3 5400U is a processor for thin and light laptops based on the Cezanne generation. The R3 5400U integrates four of the eight cores based on the Zen 3 microarchitecture and is the slowest U-series processor of the Cezanne generation at launch. The cores are clocked at 2.6 (guaranteed base clock) to 4 GHz (Turbo) and support SMT / Hyperthreading (8 threads). The chip is manufactured in the modern 7 nm process at TSMC.
The new Zen 3 microarchitecture offers a significantly higher IPC (instructions per clock) compared to Zen 2. For desktop processors AMD claims 19 percent on average and in applications reviews showed around 12% gains at the same clock speed.
Performance
While we have not tested a single system built around the 5400U as of August 2023, we are fairly confident the chip is a little faster than the Ryzen 3 5300U and its four Zen 2 cores running at clock speeds similar to what the 5400U has. Naturally, your mileage may vary depending on how competent the cooling solution of your laptop is and how high the CPU power limits are.
In addition to the four CPU cores, the APU also integrates a Radeon RX Vega 6 integrated graphics card with 6 CUs and up to 1600 MHz. The dual channel memory controller supports DDR4-3200 and energy efficient LPDDR4-4266 RAM. Furthermore, 8 MB level 3 cache (same as the old 4800U) can be found on the chip.
Power consumption
This Ryzen 3 has a default TDP (also known as the long-term power limit) of 15 W. Laptop manufacturers are free to change that value to anything between 10 W and 25 W if so desired, with clock speeds and performance changing correspondingly. Those values aren't low enough to allow for passively cooled designs.
This is a 7 nm chip; it thus has higher-than-average, as of late 2022, energy efficiency.
- Range of benchmark values for this graphics card - Average benchmark values for this graphics card * Smaller numbers mean a higher performance 1 This benchmark is not used for the average calculation
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