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Comment by guerby | Hacker News Reader

Interesting that when limited at 15W on geekbench multithread this ryzen 9 5980HS is faster than Apple M1 (and even faster at 35W), but below in single thread.

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Few things.

1. M1 in Mac Mini is estimated to be 20W to 25W.

2. M1 is 4 Performance Core + 4 Efficient Core. Compared to 8 Performance Core in Ryzen

3. Ryzen is 8 Core 16 Thread. M1 is 8 Thread.

4. Worth mentioning again, M1 is on 5nm, Ryzen is on 7nm.

As an engineer, I love examining the details. I think the M1 is a great processor, but the performance advantages have been greatly exaggerated.

As an end-user, I just don't care if my CPU is 4 threads or 16 threads or 5nm or 7nm or 15W or 20W. I only care about the price, how fast it handles my workloads, and how long the battery lasts. I think AMD understands this angle well.

I think some of the exaggeration has come from people who only use Apple products basically seeing what the cutting edge actually is, e.g. We've historically been the same performance or worse, now our tribe is the fastest - spurred on by much faster benchmarks.

Anyway I look forward to websites slowing down as M1 becomes more popular amongst Devs who shouldn't need anything that fast in the first place (ideally)

>Anyway I look forward to websites slowing down as M1 becomes more popular amongst Devs who shouldn't need anything that fast in the first place (ideally)

Yup. The "new" Reddit redesign is totally unusable on all my computers except the M1 Air. Not looking forward to more web developers getting their hands on these things.

Reddit seem to be run by a Manchurian candidate of sorts - half the time on mobile I'm genuinely thinking to myself "Do you want the traffic or not?"

They really want you to use the App so they can foist more ads upon you.

I am more than happy to read ads if the app wasn't so awful.

If HN was to (say) show me ads for various programming-y things I wouldn't be all that bothered as long as the core UX wasn't ruined.

Reddit's tech feels like a Jockey who's lost control of his horse

That’s why I use Apollo for Reddit browsing on iOS. It’s all native, as fast as you’d expect, and follows all of Apple’s UX conventions.

The redesign has absolutely no resource management. They don't load and unload media when its no longer in the viewport either from scrolling or opening a thread, and the redesign infinitely scrolls.

Plus thread view is a modal over the feed unless you navigate directly to its URL, so often times you'll have media loading and running in the thread view while other media may still be playing back in the feed.

I don't think that's the only source of the insane memory leak in Safari in particular (you will get into the GBs if you leave a media-heavy feed open past 10 minutes or so), but its gotta be a big contributor.

That doesn't sound so good, but I can do one better. The 4 FP EUs/core on the M1 (x64 has 2) that likely lead to this result might also lead other languages to use more floats and doubles.

I thought M1s SIMD throughput was lower?

It is, but the Firestorm cores can do 2x more scalar FP executions per clock than Zen 3. Still, for a full browser benchmark like Speedometer 2, I would've liked to see better results from 5800H/U given their large cache bumps from last gen.

https://www.anandtech.com/show/16226/apple-silicon-m1-a14-de...

https://www.anandtech.com/show/16214/amd-zen-3-ryzen-deep-di...

I wrote my thoughts on this a couple days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25873887

Basically, you have to remember how slow and power-hungry Mac laptops before the M1-based laptops were. They were not using the latest available technology, and the M1 switched to using the latest available technology. So for Mac laptop users, it's a giant leap. For everyone else, not as amazing a leap, but still a very good chip.

The M1 still has a clear lead in single-core performance and that at a much lower clock speed than the competition. That is the big leap in performance. There are still far to many things which depend on single core performance. This is why a Threadripper with 64 cores really shines only for very compute-intensive parallel work loads. It will be very interesting, how the performance of Apple Silicon will be, once they go to 8 or 16 high performance cores.

A bit part of this is Apple's best intel laptop (the 16") is still on a 9th gen intel. So comparing a 2020 m1 on 5nm vs a 14nm 2018 chip isn't fair. It's real if you're an apple user, and upgrade from a 16" MBP to their m1, but it's not fair.

Plus, intel isn't even the x86 leader now. 7nm zen2 is a much better comparison.

Another part of this is that I think the intel line will probably be on "maintenance mode" at Apple for now; the best and brightest engineers are probably all working on Apple Silicon products...

In this case, I think Apple does as well. It seems extremely focused on Mac/iOS user workloads and by all means does them extremely well. That it matches or beats x86 general purpose CPUs in synthetic benchmarks is an added bonus.

I think interestingly enough, the M1 does this w/ much of the die devoted to neural engine widgets

Also the fact that it works with existing software out of the box.

For as much as Macbooks are touted to be developer laptops, they should have homebrew, python, and all the other dev tools available natively from launch day.

Note that AMD has been beating Apple on single core performance since day 1. See the comparison between 4700u, M1 and micromagic Risc-v:

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/12/new-risc-v-cpu-claim...

I assume the efficient cores on M1 gives it an edge on power usage.

> Note that AMD has been beating Apple on single core performance since day 1

On EEMBC CoreMark. But CoreMark is not a meaningful benchmark outside of embedded devices.

From your linked article: "CoreMark focuses solely on the core pipeline functions of a CPU, including basic read/write, integer, and control operations. This specifically avoids most effects of system differences in memory, I/O, and so forth."

Memory & I/O are integral to CPU design, which is why AMD's own marketing material emphasizes it so much.

So you decide to cherry pick one single thread benchmark out of many to decide that AMD wins in single thread lol. In most benchmark, m1 is much faster than 4800u in ST.

Power usage follows directly from the 5nm process.

It's a factor, but not the only one.

It also depends on the foundary and the exact process and of course the CPU design.

In which case will make a very nice marketing speech for AMD

Apple just entered an extremely competitive market with the M1, which is good because we win if this market is more competitive.

They didn't enter any market they weren't already in. They've been selling laptops and sff desktops for years and they certainly haven't and aren't going to started selling CPUs. Not to say that the competition isn't good, they just haven't entered into any new markets.

The power comparison isn't Apples to Apples.

https://www.anandtech.com/show/16252/mac-mini-apple-m1-teste...

Plenty of comments noting that this isn't quite an oranges-to-oranges comparison between the AMD and the Apple hardware.

In any case, maybe the real story here is one of Intel's complacency, and AMD and Apple are both exploiting it, just in different ways.

If you look at the fourth table, the 15W config allows for 6 seconds of turbo at 42W. Which probably explains why the benchmark isn't very different between the 35W and 15W configurations. The processor probably just draws 42W for the duration of the benchmark in both cases. I don't know if comparisons to the Apple M1 are apples-to-apples (no pun intended) which tops out at like 20-25W.

That said, AMD's offering in this space is very impressive and really makes you question what Intel has been doing the last three years.

Geekbench lasts much, much more than 6 seconds.

AMD TDPs aren't like Intel. The chip will average out 15W if in a 15W TDP setting.

And that's with 7nm. Still faster than desktop mac mini M1 despite both having fans and AMD having to deal with x86 cruft.

I can wait to get my hands on one of these speed demons for my compilation workloads.

Well several things. The M1 does not have 8 equally performant cores. The M1 has only 4 of those who are faster in single core performance. Also it performs at 10W, not at 15W and does so without a fan (in the case of the MacBook Air). Hence I don't know if your comparison makes sense.

In this case the 15w was actual measured power draw not made up marketing numbers (actual measurement was 12W though I assume Anandtech opted to round up there in the other slides). The M1's actual multicore power draw is more like 20W, at least in the Mac mini being compared against here.

> Also it performs at 10W, not at 15W and does so without a fan (in the case of the MacBook Air

The comparison is with a Mac Mini that uses a fan.

15W is not far from 10W, considering Ryzen are still 7nm

IMO even 35W is not much at all, for 18 hours on battery and that kind of performances (especially the multi core).

The difference is negligible for users, assuming 8 hours a day for 365 days straight the 15W APU would consume 15KW more, in Italy it would cost about one euro more.

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