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Comment by carlycue | Hacker News Reader

It's crazy how the M1 is still unmatched 1 year and 8 months after it's release. Apple is working with some alien technology.

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I would love to see a much bigger focus on performance per watt from the rest of the industry, all the way up to high end enthusiast desktop components — even in a nice airflow focused ATX case and with a big Noctua CPU cooler, the extra noise generated when pushing the machine can be really irritating, not to mention creeping power requirements make for replacing PSUs before it’d otherwise be necessary.

On a somewhat related note, I’m also mildly annoyed that no case, cooling, and motherboard manufacturers have tried to copy the current Mac Pro’s design with dramatically larger heatsinks, about half as many fans as a typical PC (with the few it has not running as hard), and RAM on the backside of the motherboard where it can be swapped without messing with the CPU heatsink. Being able to build a generic PC version of a Mac Pro would be amazing, but unfortunately the ATX standard has accumulated cobwebs from lack of innovation.

Workstation computers, such as HP Z8 G4, uses PMG5-esque non-ATX placements, though I don't think users are half as much enthusiastic compared to Apple users about that.

That’s kind of what I was getting at, my hope is for the ATX standard to evolve to better fit modern hardware so users can enjoy many of the benefits of some of the better current non-ATX arrangements while also having a broad selection of parts available.

The ATX standards have done a good job of evolving the power delivery. But in terms of physical board dimensions and layout, little has changed and we still have a system optimized for maximum PCB surface area when what modern computers need is to maximize heatsink volume with unobstructed airflow.

I'd love to see bigger focus on performance per watt from other browser vendors, for that matter.

There was the BTX standard, which failed to catch on. Most PCs had only two fans: It used the same fan as CPU fan and main intake fan, and then the PSU fan. It had pure horizontal airflow, quite similar to earlier aluminium Mac Pros.

However, the CPU fan and cooler (including duct) had to be a fixed size. Too large for small form factor systems, and too small if you needed more cooling. ATX/mATX/mITX was cheaper, more flexible and hade more momentum.

Who else these days has an end to end ecosystem they can steer in any direction they please? So of course there is no competition.

When AMD released the Opteron A series my first thought was "This will fail as there is no Arm desktop to develop and test on. Why don't they release an Arm desktop/laptop ready APU with AMD GPU, dual channel DDR, SATA (before NVMe) and PCIe to complement it?" That would have been an awesome setup right there.

I mentioned this out loud in a forum and multiple people replied with the same retort: "No one will buy into an ARM desk/laptop without a software ecosystem." Which was true because even if you argued that Linux was good enough, who was going to buy an AMD Arm just to run Linux? Apple can point the ship where it pleases.

Unmatched by who?

It just covers a predefined set of use cases, it still doesn't match other configurations, where e.g. GPU intensive tasks require dedicated hardware.

Power to performance efficiency.

That's almost certainly not true. E.g.,

https://www.embedded.com/risc-v-core-said-to-outperform-appl...

> is said to

To most consumers, this will only be interesting if it's shipping in laptops.

What laptops are shipping with this and are outperforming the Apple processors in real life?

I'm not sure I was just responding to a claim about a CPU's performance per watt.

The quotes in that page have some of the most spectacularly misleading statistics I’ve seen for a while. Might as well point out that for telling the time looking at my watch is more energy efficient than looking at the clock in my car dashboard (and then calculating energy efficiency while comparing power consumption of a car and a watch)

Is this a shipping product?

Not sure. It's likely a lot of small low power CPUs can beat the likes of M1 on perf/watt tasks though. That one was just the first hit I got.

Also a Tesla Model 3 has a really good power to performance efficiency, but somehow people still like buying luxury and powerful cars.

It's just a metric, but the whole package is still not that awesome (software compatibility above all, but also limited amount of ports, the typical Apple walled garden, etc.)

Software compatibility is quite good on MacOS for all but specific niches, like industrial software or PC gaming. The same criticism could be said for Windows or Linux, which is why things like Wine and WSL exist.

There's no walled garden on MacOS.

No absolutely, in fact I can develop and deploy apps to iPhone and iPads from Linux and Windows, without owning a Mac.

That alien technology is coming from Taiwan.

The processor node tech is from Taiwan and plays an important role. I’d argue that a lot of the speed is also thanks to a great system architecture: the unified memory, dedicated silicon for video, ml, etc.

The manufacturing is, but so much of the magic is also the architecture of some parts of the chip like the x86 translation layer being so performant, and the hardware/software integration that enables an exceptionally smooth user experience for transitioning between architectures.

Kudos to Apple (and TSMC) for executing flawlessly on multiple levels.

And the Netherlands

The alien technology is coming from California. It’s just made in Taiwan.

The "made" part matters a lot. They heavily rely on TSMC's process being so good.

Undoubtedly a solid chip, specially for its performance per watt, but Intel's new i7-1280P performed better in comparison[1]. It'll be interesting in the coming months to see fresher benchmarks of M2 vs Intel 12th-gen vs AMD Ryzen.

[1] https://www.notebookcheck.net/Dell-XPS-13-Plus-with-i7-1280P...

In a laptop that, according to the article, is louder, hotter, and with a much shorter battery life.

That's an 6p/8e core machine vs. a 4p/4e core machine, not exactly a fair comparison. A better comparison would be against an M1 Pro or Max, with 8p/2e cores.

Some quick Googling shows that the M1 Pro/Max outperforms that Intel part by some margin.

All while my M1 Pro is in the laptop with which I have yet to experience a sound of fans running.

And I'm skeptical that the Intel can be 48% faster as this chart implies: https://i.imgur.com/uelXzJ7.png

XPS13 weight is 1.23kg that is almost identical to MacBook Air , and size is similar, so still valid comparison.

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