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Comment by em500 | Hacker News Reader

Since people are probably curious: the Ryzen 7 5800U (8-core, 15W TDP) will probably be close to (but not equal to or better than) Apple's M1 in performance (based on specs and desktop Zen3 Geekbench scores). But they will probably have significantly worse efficiency. With idle / low-CPU workload, it's probably not too bad (17-21hr on 53Wh battery), but if you're compiling on your laptop all day I'd expect much worse battery life than Apple's M1 laptops.

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I will get a 5800U nevertheless and avoid Apple's walled garden.

Now we only need proper laptops with AMD hardware. Mostly everything I seen before in dreadful state and Intel monopoly on the market doesn't help.

Apple M1 has 4 hours on battery life when playing games. Is it much better during heavy C++ compilation or Java builds?

PS: 4 hours on Air M1

The only C++ M1 time and battery benchmark I remember is from Matthew Panzarino[1]. He found that it took the M1 Air 25 minutes to do a fresh compile of WebKit, and that the Air had 91% battery remaining after finishing the compilation.

So, roughly assuming that you could compile WebKit 10 times before the laptop runs out of juice, that'd give you 4 hours 10 minutes of battery life.

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[1] https://techcrunch.com/2020/11/17/yeah-apples-m1-macbook-pro...

> but if you're compiling on your laptop all day I'd expect much worse battery life than Apple's M1 laptops.

On the flip side, you get 8 full fat cores instead of 4 fast & 4 not so fast, so your compile jobs might go a bit quicker. Have to wait for the benchmarks to find out for sure.

Note that intel has always excluded “turbo” from the tdp and amd switched to doing so with the zen2 rollout (and continues now). I don’t know if apple does the same or not.

Update: Apple does the same.

It will be significantly faster the M1 in multicore performance and slightly slower in single core.

Compiles that use multiple cores with end significantly faster and thus battery life will be compensated.

I really hope they can compete. As much as I would love Apple to pull ahead by a mile, it’s not going to help the computer space that much.

I have some Android friends who are super happy with their phones. When they ask why I’m upgrading my iPhone again and I say “it’s got a lot better performance” they usually say something like “why do you need a faster phone....my midrange 3 year old android phone is blazingly fast”.

It’s not until we lift all users in general that we will be able to create new and innovative software. I like to compare an old school project where they had to create a spell checker...but this was back when you didn’t have enough ram to keep the dictionary in memory.

More memory and faster CPUs make yesterday’s challenges trivial for today’s developers.

Reading this, I can only assume you want to be one of those people that Ubuntu targeted years ago, who can plug their phone into a dock and have the same power as top-tier desktop computer.

Otherwise, I don't really see the point. Every machine has a different purpose.

My telephone is for phone calls, texting, extremely light emailing, checking weather, using it as a GPS, occasionally taking a photo or a quick video.

My Surface Book 3 is for actual on-the-road document work, programming, light gaming, and digital painting.

My Ryzen Threadripper / RTX 3090 workstation at home is for no-shit, actual income-generating work and super-heavy-duty gaming.

My Panasonic Lumix DC-S1H is for videography, but my Canon EOS R5 is for highest-quality stills, and my Sony A7C is for travelling.

Every one of those cameras has different purposes, different use cases. Just like the rest of my hardware. There is no "one size fits all" anywhere, for anything.

> More memory and faster CPUs make yesterday’s challenges trivial for today’s developers.

Today's developers are by-and-large utter shit at designing software. Its usually poorly thought-out, poorly-documented, and poorly-maintained. The number of truly exceptional software programs out there is incredibly sparse.

makes me wonder how the world even continues to function with all that shitty code out there

> they usually say something like “why do you need a faster phone....my midrange 3 year old android phone is blazingly fast

Yes, there aren't a lot of valid reasons to spend over ~200 Euro for a phone these days (unless you're tech enthusiast).

It's hard to agree completely with this. On the one hand you can accomplish just about anything with a $150 phone, and I used one for many years. Recently though my midrange 2 year old phone could barely keep up with certain basic apps, and a upper-mid phone has been night-and-day higher quality usage experience.

I suspect a mix of Wirth's Law plus a lower level of polish on things like drivers on cheaper phones (inexplicably poor WiFi stability, for example)

I know that the situation with mid-range phones was not always so rosy. I was myself buying mostly high-end phones in the past.

But recently my friend bought a Motorola for 200 Euro - Snapdragon 730, 6 GB RAM, 128 GB UFS 2.1 storage, pretty good main camera + (so-so) ultrawide, (gimmicky) macro camera, 5000 mAh battery. I was very impressed what can 200 Euro these days buy. I'm pretty confident this phone will do just fine in 2 years too ...

But really, What do you need more cpu power on the phone for? email, whatsapp and a browser is about everything I can envision my phone for. Nothing innovative I can think of is going to change anything about what people use and need their phone for. Not that I'm against progress, better screens, lower latencies and faster loading are always appreciated.

For many people, their phone is their primary computing device. Sometimes their only computing device.

Large numbers of people use their phones for games, video/photo editing, videoconferencing (which can involve real time image processing for virtual backgrounds and appearance filters).

At the low end of the phone market, phone hardware performs significantly better today than it did two years ago for those tasks.

I guess I'm far from the target audience, video/photo editing anything bigger than cropping images and text supplements is going to feel frustrating on a mobile phone. Mobile Games always felt suboptimal for me and I wouldn't buy a phone based on gaming performance (Is that a thing?)

Realtime img processing is an interesting one. I dont see any precedent that that's a big usecase, most people just set and forget zoom calls but you've brought up a good feature.

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