Historically speaking, Apple doesn't underdelivier on their claimed numbers. I'm excited to see what they'll do with a full desktop power budget.
The smaller machines are also likely held back by cooling solutions, so if you have Intel beat on power efficiency in a tiny form factor, you can boost your clock speed too.
I would say on your topic though that Intel has a hybrid chip that might interest you. Lakefield pairs 4 modified Tremont cores with 1 Sunny Cove core.
https://www.anandtech.com/show/15877/intel-hybrid-cpu-lakefi...
I'd like to see 2 zen cores paired with 4 updated jaguar cores.
Normalizing for performance (say A14 vs 5950X at 4.5GHz instead of 5GHz) would close the gap somewhat, but it's still huge. Perhaps 4x instead of 10x - those last 500MHz on the AMD chip cost a ton of power.
Of course, none of this is particularly surprising considering Apple is using both a newer process and gets nearly 60% higher IPC.
[1]: https://www.anandtech.com/show/16226/apple-silicon-m1-a14-de...
AMD has a laptop series of CPUs, M1 compared to that is the only relevant comparison - the rest is apples to oranges.
That being said Apple has an advantage in that they control the entire stack and on the power efficiency side of things they have experience with mobile CPU design, they can do stuff like heterogeneous cores and can optimise for it throughout the stack, I think it would be challenging for x86 to do the same.
A beefy chip in an MBP 16 will be exciting, and I'm sure they are working on that, but it will make far more sense once ARM is established in the "normal" consumer models.
Need a day off? Have some errands? Hit the compile button.
What about inodes and cpu spikes even running node on osx? Let alone doing that inside a container.
Nah. OSX is long gone for "better dev experience". Linux always wins.
what constitutes a better dev experience?
- Same text editing shortcuts that work consistently throughout all apps in the system including your editor/IDE, browser, and terminal.
- iTerm2 having so called "legacy full screen mode" that I use exclusively. (I've been searching for something similar for windows/linux for quite some time).
- The general system polish and usability. This is not directly "dev experience", but it's something you interact with while doing development throughout the day and it's just hands down a lot better than anything linux has atm.
Is that about disabling animations? That can be done globally on windows and linux desktop environments.
Essentially, I always have terminal in the background even when I'm not working acting as my wallpaper.
A lot of my iPhone app builds are pretty quick though, < 1 minute.
Our unit tests took around 30 minutes on a fast system though and were simply not worth running outside of the specific tests I was writing.
But better thermals will probably mean they can run the CPU in the Pro at higher base clock speed anyway, so it will probably be faster than the air all around - we'll have to wait for benchmarks to know for sure though.
It seems likely the higher end of the performance curves are only attainable on the systems with active cooling. Or at least only sustainable with active cooling. So the MacBook Air would still realize the efficiency gains, but never the peak performance on that chart.