It's time to upgrade the computer - aka the beast. Short story - the whole M1 concept convinced me and I got myself one of those M1 Macs. I've been using it for a couple of weeks now and really can't complain. So now, the old beast has got to go. But before I pass on it's parts for recycling - I wanted to compare how this old, big and heavy Xeon electric heater compared to the M1 performance wise.
Compare the Geekbench5 results
| Single Core | Multi Core | OpenCL | |
| The Beast | 528 | 2816 | 21098 |
| M1 Mac | 1559 | 6080 | 17628 |
As the above table shows - the M1 is significantly faster than the beast. However, for gaming the beast has a small advantage - mainly due to the somewhat modern GPU that I inherited from my nephew.
Obviously the M1 is better in so many other ways - energy efficiency - size - connectivity (yes - only 2 thunderbolt ports, but that's vs 0 on the beast) - noise (no fans vs 8 ). So yeah - another hurray for the Apple M1. The only thing I miss is my virtual machines - but I will come up with a solution for that (probably a new beast - headless - AMD based).
The beast - definition
Motherboard Information
Gigabyte Technology Co., Ltd. X58A-UD7
CPU Information
Intel Xeon X5650
1 Processor, 6 Cores, 12 Threads
GenuineIntel Family 6 Model 44 Stepping 2
Base Frequency 2.68 GHz
Maximum Frequency 3 GHz
Socket 1366 LGA
Codename Westmere-EP
L1 Instruction Cache 32.0 KB x 6
L1 Data Cache 32.0 KB x 6
L2 Cache 256 KB x 6
L3 Cache 12.0 MB x 1
1 Processor, 6 Cores, 12 Threads
GenuineIntel Family 6 Model 44 Stepping 2
Base Frequency 2.68 GHz
Maximum Frequency 3 GHz
Socket 1366 LGA
Codename Westmere-EP
L1 Instruction Cache 32.0 KB x 6
L1 Data Cache 32.0 KB x 6
L2 Cache 256 KB x 6
L3 Cache 12.0 MB x 1
Memory Information
16.00 GB 669 MHz TypeDDR3 SDRAM 2 Channels
OpenCL Information
AMD Radeon HD 7800 Series
Compute Units 16
Maximum Frequency 920 MHz
Device Memory 2.00 GB
Compute Units 16
Maximum Frequency 920 MHz
Device Memory 2.00 GB
