I’m going to show you how AMD’s new Ryzen 6000 processor compares against Apple’s M1 Pro!
These are the main differences between these processors. Apple’s M1 Pro is available with 8
and 10 core options, but I’ve got the higher 10 core here which has 8 performance and 2
efficiency cores. The Ryzen 9 6900HS on the other hand is an 8 core 16 thread part,
so fewer cores but more threads and it’s also got less cache.
To do this testing I’ve got Apple’s MacBook Pro 16 with the M1 Pro, a $2500 USD machine,
and the ROG Zephyrus G14 from ASUS with AMD’s Ryzen 9 6900HS,
a smaller and relatively cheaper machine at around $1900 USD,
however you can get the same CPU but with a lower GPU than my configuration for $250 less.
Although I’ve tested the M1 Pro in the larger MacBook Pro 16, the exact same chip
is also available in the smaller MacBook Pro 14, and Max Tech has shown in this video here
that there’s basically no difference between an M1 Pro in a MacBook 14 and a MacBook Pro 16,
so although I happened to have the larger MacBook Pro 16,
we can fairly treat this as if it was a 14” laptop for a fair comparison against our 14” G14.
Temperatures varied between them when running a multi threaded CPU benchmark with some cores
being much hotter than others. To be fair, these aren’t directly comparable as results
depend on where sensors are in the chip and how software reports them, but it gives us a rough
idea that when in a sustained heavy workload, both chips can run above 90 degrees Celsius.
Now hang on just a moment, although both laptops do run relatively warm,
we need to have a listen to the fan noise difference.
Now just full disclosure, while there probably won’t be performance differences between the
MacBook Pro 16 and MacBook Pro 14, I would expect there to be some thermal differences.
For example people have reported that the MacBook Pro 14 runs with higher fan speed,
but still even with that difference it’s way quieter than the G14.
The MacBook was running significantly quieter, and that’s because it’s drawing
less power from the wall, as shown here. In the Cinebench R23 multi core benchmark,
the Ryzen 9 6900HS laptop was using 118% more wattage from the wall, a crazy difference.
Well, I suppose it’s only crazy if Ryzen doesn’t also offer us
a corresponding performance uplift to make that higher power draw worthwhile,
so let’s have a look and see how both chips perform in different applications.
Cinebench is just a nice way to quickly get a rough idea of what to expect
in terms of both single and multi threaded performance - don’t worry we’ll cover more
practical workloads next. The single core score was just 4% higher with Ryzen in this test,
while the multi core score had a larger 11% lead. So Ryzen in the g14 was technically winning,
but for 118% more power? The M1 chip is clearly much more power efficient. We could
of course limit the power to the Ryzen chip with software, something we can’t do to the M1 Pro,
but I decided to just run both to the best of their ability here.
Performance on battery power is where things continue to get impressive for Apple. Although
the Ryzen 9 6900HS still has the lead here as far as the score is concerned, the M1 Pro is
essentially scoring the same regardless of whether or not it’s plugged into power. The AMD machine
lowered by around 1000 points in the multi core score, which to be fair, is far lower than we’d
see from an Intel based laptop, but yeah compared to AMD, M1 Pro is clearly more power efficient.
Alright back to comparing with both plugged into power for max performance.
Adobe Premiere is a more practical video editing test and was tested with the Puget
Systems benchmark. Adobe has an M1 native version of Premiere for MacOS, so this was used for best
performance on the MacBook Pro. The M1 Pro was reaching a 75% higher score in this test,
not too surprising as generally I don’t find AMD’s Radeon graphics to do too well here.
This test utilizes both the CPU and the GPU,
and you could argue that as the 6900HS has its own built in graphics it’s not fair to
include the discrete RX 6800S graphics. I’ve also included results from just the
Ryzen integrated graphics so you can see the difference, and these are even worse.
Those were the overall test scores, we can drill down into specific aspects like
exporting for example. In terms of actually exporting a video project,
the 6900HS wasn’t too far behind the M1 Pro, but again if you don’t count
the Radeon 6800S discrete graphics in the G14 then AMD is further behind.
The live playback scores were much further ahead on the M1 Pro, it’s not even a competition at
this point, so expect a smoother video editing experience on the MacBook. The differences in
the effects score weren’t as large, but still an easy win for the MacBook here.
I’ve also tested DaVinci Resolve. Although Resolve itself does have an M1 Native version for MacOS,
unfortunately the Puget Systems benchmark doesn’t currently support it, so I’ve done my own video
export using the YouTube 4K preset. I also wasn’t able to run the test with only the integrated
graphics, so this is more like a direct comparison between the G14 and MacBook rather than just the
CPUs because the GPUs are being used. Anyway the 6900HS system was completing the task 18% faster.
AMD’s 6900HS was able to complete my Handbrake video transcode test 83% faster. Although there
is an M1 native version of Handbrake, which I used for this test, I believe handbrake
is able to take advantage of AVX processor instructions to complete the task faster.
Things went completely the other way in the LLVM compilation test with the M1 Pro completing this
task 77% faster than Ryzen. This was one of the largest differences in favor of the MacBook
out of all applications tested. Perhaps there’s a good reason why so many programmers use it.
7-Zip was used to test compression and decompression. Both were extremely close
together when it came to compression speed, however Ryzen had a huge lead in terms of
decompression despite this version of 7-Zip having a native M1 option.
Blender was tested with the latest 3.1 version which has native M1 support too.
Massive thanks to Tim at Hardware Unboxed for providing me the updated data, as a recent
Blender update prevented me from fairly comparing the 6900HS otherwise. The 6900HS was 16% faster
in the Classroom and Junkshop tests, but had a much smaller lead in the Monster test.
With the V-Ray benchmark we start getting into applications that don’t yet have full
native M1 support. While running the benchmark I confirmed that it was running via the Rosetta 2
emulation layer, so there could potentially be a performance improvement in future
if this test is updated with M1 support. I guess you could argue this isn’t fair,
but the fact is it’s the real current state of M1 - not all applications have been
updated for optimal performance. This is likely contributing to the 6900HS scoring 37% higher.
The corona renderer benchmark also runs via Rosetta 2 with no native M1 version, which
is probably in part why the Ryzen laptop was able to complete the task 43% faster than the MacBook.
VeraCrypt was used to test AES encryption and decryption and is a bit of a weird one. Although
there is actually native M1 support for this version of the software, it might not be taking
advantage of hardware accelerated AES, which would explain why Ryzen is significantly faster. With
x86 processors, the AES-NI instruction set can be leveraged to boost performance. Honestly I’m
not sure what exists here for M1, but in any case the simple fact is that right now at the
time of testing the latest version of VeraCrypt clearly can’t make use of any similar feature.
CrossMark is a cross-platform benchmark that aims to measure
overall system performance and responsiveness. This test has a native M1 version for MacOS,
and I found the 6900HS to score 10% higher than the M1 Pro. This test has three sub scores titled
productivity, creativity and responsiveness, which sound a bit arbitrary as I don’t really
know what they test. Take the responsiveness score for example, Ryzen is 34% ahead,
does this mean it's 34% more responsive? Probably not, given I’d say my experience using MacOS felt
smoother for the most part compared to Windows 11, but more number means more better right?
For example if I use the Speedometer benchmark which runs in the web browser
to test the responsiveness of web applications and scripts, after averaging 5 test runs the
MacBook scored 21% higher with Safari compared to Ryzen with Google Chrome.
Speaking of less useful benchmarks (with regards to Crossmark that is), I left Geekbench until
later because I just don’t rely on the results, but some of you ask for it and a lot of other
comparisons basically only rely on it. This test also has a native M1 version, and in the workloads
run by this test, the M1 Pro was 21% higher in the multi threaded test. Quite impressive given
the lower thread count. Otherwise the M1 Pro was also scoring 8% higher in the single core test.
These are the differences in all of the applications just tested. The biggest difference
was AES encryption and decryption right up the top for the reasons discussed earlier. Otherwise LLVM
compilation had a good lead on the M1 Pro, as did Adobe Premiere. The Adobe Premiere result here is
more of a comparison between the G14 and MacBook as I’ve used its higher score with the 6800S
active, the M1 Pro would be even further ahead if we’re just comparing it to the Radeon iGPU.
Out of these specific tests, the Ryzen 9 6900HS is over 82% faster, but if we choose not to factor in
those big AES outliers then we’re instead looking at AMD being about 10% faster than the M1 Pro in
the rest of the tests. This of course only applies to this exact selection of workloads and isn’t a
general statement as there are a random number of both single and multi threaded tests here,
but regardless it’s enough to show you that results really depend on the specific workload.
Now that said, we of course can’t forget the differences noted earlier,
like the MacBook using less power, running quieter and still getting full performance on battery.
It does cost more than the G14 though, but ultimately the selection for you depends on the
tasks you plan on using the device for and to some degree your preference of either Windows or Linux,
or MacOS. If you plan on playing a bunch of games for example then I'd definitely
be leaning towards the G14 because it's just objectively going to be a much better experience.
Check out this video next to see how Apple’s M1 Pro compares against Intel’s 12th gen laptop
CPUs. The difference is much bigger than what we’ve seen here as Intel goes up to 14 cores
20 threads this generation, so I’ll see you in that one next. Otherwise get subscribed
for when Apple’s new M2 chips are here and we get to do these comparisons all over again!