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Comment by ksec | Hacker News Reader

At roughly 25W per Performance Core running at 5.2GHz on Intel 7nm High Performance Node, with a ST Geekbench score of ~1900. Compared to The Apple M1 Max running at 3.2GHz on a TSMC 5nm Low Power node, at roughly 5W per core, with Geekbench score of ~1750.

The is 5x the power for a 8.5% of performance increase.

But I know there are many who just want to get the best ST performance regardless or power usage. And considering someone Overclock the thing past 8Ghz barrier. It is still pretty damn impressive.

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I see this comparison all the time in articles about Intel, but until I can build a desktop with M1 Pro/Max, they are meaningless.

That is the difference between a consumer review and tech review. They may be meaningless to consumers, but they are meaningful for those of us only want to learn about tech.

This it the same with Graviton 2 on Servers.

> They may be meaningless to consumers, but they are meaningful for those of us only want to learn about tech.

It's actually misleading to compare apples and oranges like this.

CPU power efficiency is very non-linear. For example (made up numbers for example), it might require double the power to go from 3GHz to 4GHz and another doubling of power to go from 4GHz to 5GHz.

If you're designing a low-power laptop chip, you take advantage of this fact and operate it at the lower frequencies. You may be able to cut the power consumption by 1/4 and still get 60-70% of the performance.

If you're building a desktop for enthusiasts who are buying big liquid coolers, you go the other direction and push the CPU to the limit. That's what Intel did here.

This factors in at the design stage, too. It's not as simple as taking the same design and scaling it up or down. You need to target your timings around a range of clock speeds and voltages.

Drawing comparisons isn't as simple as dividing Geekbench scores by power consumption because the underlying math is very non-linear.

>It's actually misleading to compare apples and oranges like this.

I never make the claim it scale linearly. And I have been very explicit in the node simply because I expect technical reader should know it doesn't scale linearly ( may be I should have wrote it down just in case ) and as I wrote in my another reply you cant even use the TSMC N5 and scale to 5+Ghz. It is not optimised nor tested for that clock speed.

To make the comparison on a low power node, Alderlake using 5W at 3.2Ghz, and scale linearly with GB5 score, it would get a result of 1140. On the same power, M1 is able to score 50% higher. Or 50% increase in IPC.

But that comparison in my view is unfair if not truly misleading. Because there are a lot of assumption involved, from scaling to design and performance characteristics. Where as the previous comparison was done with two actual product based on facts, and you should draw your own conclusion within the context.

OTOH when Apple takes an M1 from a laptop and puts it in a desktop... the performance and power are exactly the same. So it probably is fair to compare M1 Pro vs. 12900K.

Thankfully now we can set arbitrary power limit to my own CPU. I'd like to see benchmarks setup with same power usage.

they are meaningless to oem's and manufacturers as well since they cant buy an M1 and build a system around it.

Most reviews are meaningless as a whole in the global context; most people can't afford any of the high performance parts of the electricity to power them anyway, and those that can now have the problem of shortages making it hard to get the parts at all.

The only thing all of us get out of this is: context matters.

Bummer, I made a typo.

> parts of the electricity -> parts OR the electricity

Quite the distinction there. I was referring to reviews in the global context where there are plenty of places on earth where even getting power is hard and you might be constrained to limited wattage or battery backups that drain very fast on high performance parts. All to build up an extra example context where there is no 'absolute' truth to some reviews out there.

Sorry about my impulsive correction:

It is Intel 7 (formerly known as Intel's 10nm process).

There is also Intel 4 (formerly known as Intel's 7nm process).

Yes except I got asked again and again what is "Intel 7". So I am going to stick with a simple naming scheme that right now happens to be about the same across all three foundry working on leading node, Samsung, Intel and TSMC. And everyone can relate or understand.

If that is the case shouldn't you call it "Intel 10nm" since that is what it was called when Intel was still using the same units as everyone else (even if those units are becoming meaningless)?

Not even Intel itself says that "Intel 7" means "7nm", right?

Even if Intel was using "nm" like everyone else, Intel's naming was closer to reality then the rest of the industry. TSMC and Samsung's "nm" is more of a marketing term.

Intel's 10nm is relatively close to TSMC's 7nm in term of density. That's why Intel renamed it to "Intel 7".

Technically, even TSMC calls it N7, and not 7nm.

But as you said, those units are more or less meaningless. Its just marketing.

Intel have a different process that used to documetned and marketed as 7nm. That process since has been renamed to Intel 4.

Regardless of discussions about actual density and the meaningless, it's important to make the discussions between Intel 7 and 7nm (now Intel 4) to prevent confusion. Otherwise people might mistakenly think Alder Lake is on the process previously known as Intel 7nm.

Fortunately, once we get to Intel 4, it becomes unambitious again.

5x the power so you can run x86 32-bit and 64-bit code. I don't see the performance part as being that important

I run x86 code all the time on my M1 Mac.

And surprisingly well given it's being transpiled.

Apple ditched all the x86-32 code with Big Sur (one reason we can't upgrade at work..). So its a subset. They did the same with 32 bit iOS Apps. Apple is happy to leave old software behind.

Imagine what Intel could accomplish on the TSMC node!

Only 2.5x the power usage?

More seriously, there's always a few comments on threads like this claiming it's unfair to compare Intel to AMD or Apple because "they have a larger node size and are hamstrung by it." Which is Intel's choice, they were happy having a superior node all to themselves for decades and now it's a problem for them.

I don't remember people saying AMD was just as good as Intel but was just on a worse node either, did it matter to anyone but AMD fanboys?

For those that do not care just about the faster CPUs on benchmark and tribal fights, and like instead to nerd out about architectures, it is still interesting to know whether Apple superiority is due the ARM architecture, the Apple microarchitecture improvements or TSMC process.

It is likely a mix of all three and of course microarchitecture cant be easily disentangled from the process.

Unfortunately I’ve seldom seen discussions framed in that architectural curiosity context.

The drowning out discussion noise seems to be much more of the macho-tribal variety of shallow assumptions and absolutist conclusions.

And that’s really too bad, because I do really enjoy conversations framed in honest wondering and non-biased estimation of the future potential of various architectures.

There are relatively large differences in performance between implementations of ARM X1, so yeah, there is more to it than microarchitecture.

Yes. That is why I have been very explicit about node numbers and characteristics along with clock speed. Apple cant push to 5GHz without using another node and possibly some redesign. Intel using their own ultra low Power node or even TSMC 5nm low power node will not be able to reach 5Ghz either.

And let people make their own judgement. Again this isn't for consumer review, just for those interested in tech and how it all fits together.

Well, it made less sense to make excuses about fabs back when Intel and AMD both ran their own fabs.

When did they make these excuses? AMD hasn’t had its own fabs for about a decade way before Intel was stuck on 14nm.

These biased sites will declare Intel the winner despite the higher cost in motherboard, CPU, power usage, cost to overclock, and heat creation. These tech sites are obviously nothing but product shilling sites with a cheap veneer that relies on their old reputation, but after seeing them all saying the opposite of reality with Ryzen, I won't give them clicks and I won't buy Intel again.

lmao what?

He's not wrong per se though he's wrong in this case, because many tech reviewers were overly enthusiastic about Ryzen parts and acted as-if they're much better than their Intel counterparts because they performed better in various benchmarks and productivity applications; this is kind of a meme in the gaming scene (where AMD's best CPUs generally still struggle with Intel's 10th gen offerings).

In tech your product has to be REALLY bad in order to receive critical reviews and manufacturers are basically smart enough to just not send these bad products to reviewers, so you basically get no or few reviews on them. Most reviewers are completely dependent on the manufacturers to give them stuff to review at no cost, and obviously when your reviews are too critical they're going to stop sending you stuff, which threatens the reviewer's business. There are very few reviewers who can do highly critical reviews, GamersNexus comes to mind. Notice how they're often not getting stuff from the manufacturer but buy it off the shelf instead.

Lots of tech reviews will also not say anything bad, for instance anyone critial of Apple won't get access to their events, products, and will be blacklisted.

You can't trust these publications at all anymore.

actually you are either wrong or didn't even watched gamersnexus. because they rated the 5600x amd as one of the best gaming cpu for a long time.

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