Apple M1 vs AMD Ryzen 7 4800HS

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 7 4800HS

The AMD Ryzen 7 4800HS is a mobile SoC for big laptops based on the Renoir architecture. The 4800HS integrates all eight cores based on the Zen 2 microarchitecture. They are clocked at 2.9 (guaranteed base clock) to 4.2 GHz (Turbo) and support SMT for a total of 16 threads. The chip is manufactured on the modern 7 nm TSMC process and partly thanks to it AMD advertises a 2x improved performance per Watt for the Renoir chips. The 4800HS is the 35 Watt version (-10 Watt) of the Ryzen 7 4800H.

In addition to the eight CPU cores, the APU also integrates a Radeon RX Vega 7 integrated graphics adapter with 7 CUs at up to 1,600 MHz. The dual channel memory controller supports DDR4-3200 and energy efficient LPDDR4-4266 RAM. Furthermore, 8 MB of L3 cache can be found on the chip. See our hub page on the Renoir Processors for more information.

Performance

The average 4800HS in our database is an impressively fast CPU that isn't afraid of picking a fight with the Intel Core i9-10980HK and the Core i7-11850H, as far as multi-thread benchmark scores are concerned. The Ryzen is fast enough for nearly all apps and games you could possibly throw at it, as of mid 2022.

Your mileage may vary depending on how high the CPU power limits are and how competent the cooling solution of your system is.

Power consumption

This Ryzen 7 has a default TDP, also known as the long-term power limit, of 35 W. Which is too high to allow for passively cooled setups.

The AMD Ryzen 7 4800HS is built with TSMC's 7 nm process leading to average, as of mid 2023, energy efficiency.