Comment by soylentnewsorg | Hacker News Reader

Comment by soylentnewsorg | Hacker News Reader

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No, your 5 year old laptop is not faster than the modern i7 counterparts. and it can be slower than modern ones. Except it's not, because they have larger cache sizes.

what your metrics tell me is there's something bogus going on with your comparisons. the xeon dell smokes the m1 air, your test numbers says it's half the speed. that's a level of difference where it's not even worth looking at what the testers did.

yes, 9h of battery life during normal use. just like the 11h normal use time I compared it to on the mac.

now as far as amd, thats bs too, again for work, not your game station. xeons are a year+ behind AMD on tech, because they are for professional use. AMD has you beta testing the latest and greatest, while Intel does that on consumer CPUs, and only then moves the now tried and true tech to Xeon - they learned their lesson w/ the original pentium and don't care to repeat it, while amd keeps getting weird calculation bugs that either crash your system or worse - corrupt data.

Citation please on “the Xeon dell smokes the M1 air”, geek bench says the M1 air can be twice as fast.

All other things being equal: your statement is simply not true.

I just checked and I can’t find a mobile Xeon with a greater TDP than 45w, so you’re stuck with that geek bench score because that’s essentially as good as it gets for a modern mobile Xeon.

Xeons, fwiw, are just higher binned i7s and i9s with features still enabled. The reason they can be slower than i7s and i9s is that the memory controller has to do more work and the way Intel does multi-core (essentially a ring bus) doesn’t scale gracefully always.

All things are not equal though. Geekbench includes many things that run on the GPU - video encoding and playback, rendering web pages - heck even your window manager mostly uses the GPU. The Dell has low power low performance GPU. To use the second one - an NVIDIA RTX, which is literally the fastest thing you can put in a laptop. You have to explicitly tell your OS to use that GPU for a program - it defaults to the low power one.

In summary, you are full of crap if you think an untuned blind geekbench score is what you're going by - an aggregation of a whole bunch of tests, using defaults. My statement is true, as I kick off the same data processing script on my laptop and it finishes it over lunch, while my coworker kicks it off overnight.

> Xeon with a greater TDP than 45w

yes, the Xeon W-11955M in the Dell is 45W. Now add the RTX GPU - which coincidentally will be doing most of the work. Unless you're running the geekbench test you're referring to, to purposely gimp the results. That Intel integrated graphics chip uses almost no power.

go process a large dataset and do some calculations on it. Run a bunch of VMs while you're doing it to - let's say 3. Give each one 32G of memory. Better be ECC memory too, or your data won't be reliable. Maybe in about 5 years when apple catches up to the current pro laptops, you'll be able to. This is why all the m1 comparisons they do is to previous generation intel chips in their old laptops. which have always been slow. apple has always used outdated hardware, in everything they've ever made.

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