https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/AMD-Ryzen-7-PRO-5850U-v...
but is 19% slower in single core performance. However, if you consider that AMD uses 7nm and Apple 5nm technology to build their processors, AMD is a lot better.
The last part is not entirely accurate. They have the same TDP. Not the same power consumption. Because 5850U doesn't use 15W in those test. The same goes to M1 which is closer to 20W Max.
The word TDP means Typical TDP by both Intel and AMD and not what it means in literal sense. That is excluding cTDP and other state like PL2.
Worth mentioning the M1 achieve those single thread performance at no more than 5W, if you put the two on equal footing, even accounting for the possible node improvement, M1 is still quite far ahead in terms of pref / watt. And the 5850 is already on Zen 3.
The next emotional preservation tactic usually cites the old GF IO Die, but that was only on H/desktop series chips anyways and furthermore they still lose to Apple in sheer performance per watt.
It's August 2021 and we still have to have this conversation. Sigh
AMD reduced the CU count down to 8 and ramped the clockspeeds which is terrible for the thermal budget. If you need to offload stuff to the GPU, both GPU clocks and CPU clocks dramatically lower. AMD needs a 16CU design with RDNA2 if they hope to actually compete with current and upcoming designs.
Speaking of upcoming, Apple's next generation will be announced in the next 2-3 weeks. A15 and either M1X or M2 (or maybe both) on N5P which should be 10-15% better than the previous N5 process. That's what 5850U is actually competing against considering how long it took to get out the door.
Things aren't looking pretty for x86. Now if we could just get some nice RISC-V designs shipping...
I'd love to see actual measurements for both chips.
[1] https://www.notebookcheck.net/AMD-Ryzen-7-PRO-5850U-Processo...
Ryzen : https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=AMD+Ryzen+7+PRO+585...
M1 : https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Apple+M1+8+Core+320...
TDPs don't mean anything even within a vendor lineup, and doing cross comparison is futile (without properly measuring yourself the power consumption at load, then you can start doing real efficiency comparison or apple to apple).
An easy way to verify it, is to measure the benchmark delta when on battery and when connected to an external power source. (M1 benchmarks remains almost the same)
Intel i7 9750H for example has a P2 of above 80W and only then can it break the 4Ghz barrier. Even though the processor is technically rated only 45W. At 45W it can just maintain the base clock i.e. 2.6Ghz on all cores.
M1 is much more efficient than any x86 chip on the market right now.
So if you change the performance settings they allow the laptop to draw 10W from the battery while plugged in for a little bit but it will throttle down to 95W to keep itself running. It still throttles which is I think the GGP’s point.
Which means, we don't really have a good way to benchmark power usage on laptops in a practical sense. We'd likely need to bust out the soldering iron + oscilloscope and measure currents entering the laptop's VRMs to accurately measure power usage over time.
I know laptops / cores have an "amp-counter" on board somewhere, but there's no guarantee that these devices are consistent or accurate across different laptops. Its sufficient for measuring how much energy different bits of code has (ex: Linux powertop tools), but not sufficient at comparing Apple M1 vs AMD Zen3 chips. We need a 3rd, trusted and independent measurement of power usage.
We can't just assume a 65W power adapter leads to 65W peak usage. Perhaps in the past when laptop designs were more in spec that was a decent assumption. But that time has passed, and today's laptops often do peak at power usages far in excess of their charger capacities (albeit temporarily, but even then, that makes measurements / benchmarks very difficult).
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I guess if you physically remove the battery pack (is that still allowed on these laptops?) and then plug it in, we might be getting somewhere. But the Macbook Pro doesn't have an easily removable battery pack.
That's the reason we didn't review laptop CPUs when I reviewed CPUs. You can get exact CPU power draw on a desktop motherboard (by using an amp clamp on the P8 connector) but it's hard (or not possible) to do that across multiple laptop chassis.
Removing battery (when possible) is not a solution either as what you get may differ a lot from classic "plugged in" usage (see the references to the MacBook Pro and Dell that used an i9 that still drained the battery when plugged in, because they can use more power than the power adapter brings).
On top of that, way too much depends on the OEM design and the performance of a given CPU will greatly vary from one chassis to another, because of the various throttling mechanism and the various configurable things that OEM can do (it's not just the cTDP, you can as an OEM play with various turbo times, another person mentionned P2 states, which is one of those).
So a given mobile CPU performance means nothing at the end of the day, only the laptop "as a whole" can be measured, which is why you don't see good quality benchmarks of mobile CPUs.
Anyway, just a small complement :
> laptops / cores have an "amp-counter" on board somewhere
Intel (and AMD to some measure) CPUs all have various sensors on chip that gives you the power consumption in watts (or amps, depending). They can be read with software such as hwinfo [1].
Those are usually not incredibly reliable though, they are not calibrated per CPU and it's very much a guestimate that could easily be in some cases +/- 5W off.
So sadly, not usable either (especially on mobile).
[1] : https://www.hwinfo.com/
https://www.dell.com/support/kbdoc/en-us/000140513/gaming-la...
This is 100% an Intel thing.
Similarly, benchmarking is a core component of CPU evaluation, allowing for isolated (and combined) analysis of the CPU's performance characteristics.
Handwaving both of these away is extremely misleading.
More importantly, as pointed out by a sibling comment, the AMD CPU in question (like most mobile Intel CPUs) has a "configurable" TDP which is set higher on most products sold. And PassMark doesn't differentiate those and only mention the "official" TDP.
To PassMark credit, they give a distribution of performance scores, just compare the distribution of the Ryzen and the M1 and you'll see (you have to scroll down a bit to see the graphs) :
Ryzen : https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=AMD+Ryzen+7+PRO+585...
M1 : https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Apple+M1+8+Core+320...
In general, you can't compare TDPs even within a brand, they rarely mean what it used to mean a few years back as they "innovate" with various turbo mechanism and other OEM configurable settings.
[1] https://www.synopsys.com/dw/emllselector.php?f=TSMC&n=7&s=r3...
EDIT: not the same processor: https://simplynuc.com/cbm1r8rb/
This is physics after all and 15W are 15W no matter if they go into an Apple M1 or an AMD Ryzen.
This is also where design decisions matter: for example, a while back I measured hashing performance for some boxes which needed to check data integrity and an Intel chip handily lost despite being faster on everything else because the embedded processor I was comparing it to had dedicate SHA hardware which was both faster and more power efficient than a generic x86 implementation. That’s ancient history now but I would expect Apple to aggressively explore opportunities to improve their stack like that since they control it at every level - for example, I believe benchmarks have shown Objective-C message passing is considerably faster on M1.
Apple has the advantage of developing and deploying hardware, OS and system software completely in-house.
AMD only supplies chips and basic firmware, both of which can be configured by OEMs/ODMs and the OS and software come from entirely different parties again.
So the usage profile depends on external factors, not just the CPU itself. In the end, however, a 15W power budget is a 15W power budget and an M1 under full load and a Ryzen under full load will have the same thermal output if configured the same (as far as power consumption goes).
How well the waste heat is managed is not in the hands of the CPU.
Finally, again, 15W TDP is not the same as 15W under normal usage. That misunderstanding appears to be driving most of your disagreements in this thread.
No. The CPUs can be configured to consume no more than 15 Watts, even if few OEMs do so. Same goes for the M1 - there's no difference with regards to this: both the MBP 13 and the Mac Mini have higher power limits and active cooling for that reason.
In fact, the latest U-series mobile Ryzen CPUs are even optimised to be most efficient at a 15W power level, contrary to Intel's Ice Lake chips, which get the most performance at a higher wattage configuration of 28 Watts.
That's a term in the industry with a specific meaning:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_design_power
The key thing to understand is that this is not measured power consumption while running the benchmarks and you cannot reliably compare the values even across the same product line, much less across chips — especially when we're talking about SoC designs where, for example, the TDP refers to the entire chip but the benchmarks being discussed are all CPU-focused and don't even exercise the GPU at all. We also know that TDP numbers are not a hard ceiling: there are some chips which under some conditions — most commonly but not always synthetic benchmarks — will exceed those figures, possibly by somewhat significant margins.
What you see there is are the power limits of the CPU (as reported by HWInfo64).
If you set the POWER LIMIT in the UEFI/BIOS, this regulates THE POWER consumption of the chip. NOTHING to do with TDP.
Why is that so hard to grasp for you? You can even measure the power rom the wall to confirm this. I am NOT talking about TDP here!
Those chips usually have 3.5-4GHz turbos, but in a fanless config, you'll never see them (and even with active cooling, you won't see them for more than a handful of seconds).