MacOS SU users: Is there a new Mac Studio in your future?

[jellway]

@Beamer2

Anyway, you say GHz is not a comparison metric … it’s puzzling then that the GHz clock speed has been used (at least in the past) so widely to tout the virtues of the various chip iterations? A higher GHz was always “better”.

You spotted my pun! hahaha

So if we dig a bit into Geekbench results, it’s a pretty good way to get in indication of the performance comparison between processors. Apologies if I am over explaining this, but will do so for people reading along that might not know all the detail! When thinking about SketchUp of course, only look at the single core results given its not a multi threaded app (larger number being better). I have three machines here. One Intel based Mac and 2x M1 based Macs.

Here are my results:

• 1085 = 2019 MacBook Pro 16" (Intel Core i9-9980HK 2400MHz)
• 1712 = 2020 Mac mini (M1 3149 MHz)
• 1741 = 2021 MacBook Pro 16" (M1 Pro 3221 MHz)

Searching on Geekbench there are two machines in the league of what you described as having. Going to assume yours is the 2017 given it is 4 cores.

• 1105 = 2017 iMac 27" (Intel Core i7-7700K 4200MHz 4 core)
• 1251 = 2020 iMac 27" (Intel Core i7-10700K 3800MHz 8 core)

So what do I take from all this?

1. Clock speeds (MHz number) don’t necessarily increase with performance.
2. Your 27" iMac is in the same league as my old Intel MacBook Pro 16" (1085 vs 1105)
3. My M1 MacBook Pro is approx 60% faster than my old Intel MacBook Pro and your 27" iMac (1105 vs 1782). So not double the speed > more like 1.5x.
4. My M1 Mac mini isn’t that far off my M1 MacBook Pro. This is a pretty good indication that most of the M1 Mac models are performing similar in terms of single core performance. So buying an M1 Max or M1 Ultra chip is a waste of money unless you use other applicants that either take advantage of multiple processing cores or the graphics architecture. You can see this on the Geekbench results that you posted earlier > all hover around the 1700 mark.