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Comment by paulmd | Hacker News Reader

xeon branded workstation laptops aren't using Icelake-SP or similar server chips, they are using Tiger Lake-S or Ice Lake-S or Skylake-S client chips.

They are what would previously have been branded as "Xeon E3" series chips - on the desktop platform they used to share a socket and be drop-in upgrades with consumer desktop chips, because they're basically the same chips with "enterprise" features like ECC turned on.

An example would be Xeon E3-1285 v3 - which is basically the same thing as an i7 4770.

These products are nowhere, nowhere near the M1 Max. They are consumer laptop chips with ECC and vPro turned on.

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Yes, your Xeon from 2013 example would be nowhere near the 2021 CPU from Apple. The outdated Xeon Apple had in their old laptops - a year behind everyone else, is also slower. The Xeon W-11955M however makes the M1 look like a kid's toy. In fact, if you remove 2 cores from that Xeon, you'll have my 6-core Xeon. Which also smokes that 10-core M1 in a bong.

I'm also not sure why you're sarcastic about ECC RAM. I have 128GB of RAM in my laptop. If it wasn't ECC, I'd have crashes in my VMs and errors in my calculations. When you go 32GB+ and actually use the RAM, anything that doesn't support ECC cannot be taken seriously for professional use. Like the M1 Max.

The point is that a laptop Xeon from 2021 is also going to be the same as an 1185G7 or something similar - because they’re the same silicon. It’s not like you’re getting more silicon because it’s a Xeon, it’s not a server chip, it’s just a laptop chip with the enterprise features enabled.

So, really no need to test them specifically. Go get an 1185G7 or something and you know what “Mobile Xeon” benches will look like. Anandtech already did those benches.

https://images.anandtech.com/graphs/graph17024/117496.png

> doesn't support ECC cannot be taken seriously for professional use. Like the M1 Max.

M1X is using DDR5 which does have on-die ECC.

Just being pedantic, DDR5's implementation of on-die ECC is still not equivalent to the implementation on CPUs. It doesn't account for errors that occur during processing, and there's still a pretty significant chance of corruption in L1-3 caches.

> The outdated Xeon Apple had in their old laptops

Apple has never sold a laptop with a Xeon in it.

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