Three months after their release, the first Apple Silicon Macs continue to be the subject of various comparative tests highlighting the capabilities of the Apple M1 chip. This week, photographer Andrew Hoyle of CNET shares some interesting measurements made during his work on a MacBook Pro M1 equipped with 16 GB of RAM, with a prism on the capacities of Rosetta 2, the Apple emulator which allows Macs equipped with ARM chips to ” open applications initially intended for Intel x86 processors in a completely transparent manner.
In Adobe Photoshop, Andrew Hoyle performed an alignment and merge (stacking of focus) of 19 full resolution RAW images into a single layer. He tested this task on the classic non-optimized ARM version of Photoshop, then on a beta optimized for the M1 chip: it went from a compute time of 147.2 seconds to just 69.5 seconds. Enough to beat his work PC, a monster equipped with an AMD Ryzen 9 3950X processor, an Nvidia RTX Titan graphics card and 128 GB of RAM by a few seconds.
On Adobe Premiere, the export of a video in Full HD has also progressed very strongly between the emulated version of the software and the beta version optimized for Apple Silicon: on his test, Andrew Hoyle went from a waiting time of 385 to 204 seconds. For this export, the MacBook Pro, on the other hand, remained 2.5 times slower than the PC and its dedicated graphics card.
Many tests have shown a drop in raw performance of around 30% when using Rosetta 2. This is not a universal rule, however, and Adobe software shows us that the difference between emulated software and optimized software can be significantly more important. This does not prevent the modest Apple M1 chip – an entry-level model, let us remember – to stand up on certain tasks to much beefier competing processors.
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