Apple M1 vs AMD Ryzen 5 4600U

Apple M1

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.

AMD Ryzen 5 4600U

The AMD Ryzen 5 4600U is a processor for thin and light laptops based on the Renoir architecture. The 4600U integrates six cores based on the Zen 2 microarchitecture. They are clocked at 2.1 (guaranteed base clock) to 4 GHz (Turbo) with SMT / Hyperthreading support (12 threads). The chip is manufactured in the modern 7 nm process at TSMC and partly thanks to it AMD advertises a 2x improved performance per Watt for the Renoir chips.

With two less cores, the Ryzen 5 4600U is clearly slower than the Ryzen 7 4700U and 4800U in multi threaded workloads. However, it should still beat the fastest 15 Watt Ice Lake Intel Core i7-1065G7 (4 cores, 3.9 GHz). Thanks to the 4 GHz Boost clock, the single core performance should be similar. Therefore, the Ryzen 5 4600U is a very fast 15 Watt CPU and clearly faster than the old Ryzen 7 3700U.

In addition to the six CPU cores, the APU also integrates a Radeon RX Vega 6 integrated graphics card with 6 CUs and up to 1500 MHz. The dual channel memory controller supports DDR4-3200 and energy efficient LPDDR4-4266 RAM. Furthermore, 8 MB level 3 cache can be found on the chip. See our hub page on the Renoir Processors for more information.

The TDP of the APU is specified at 15 Watt (default) and can be configured from 10 to 25 Watt by the laptop vendor. That means the chip is intended for thin and light laptops (but with fans).