It's not that Intel is bad, it's still pretty great but in the age of M1 I wish Intel released a processor with similar power consumption.
I use my Intel i5-1240p with turbo boost disabled when on battery. Here's the geekbench with TB disabled. https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/16497299
Intel is in a better position financially than AMD was, and could catch up again. I tend to think it depends a lot on the organization and the people.
IC: A few people consider you 'The Father of Zen', do you think you’d scribe to that position? Or should that go to somebody else?
JK: Perhaps one of the uncles. There were a lot of really great people on Zen. There was a methodology team that was worldwide, the SoC team was partly in Austin and partly in India, the floating-point cache was done in Colorado, the core execution front end was in Austin, the Arm front end was in Sunnyvale, and we had good technical leaders. I was in daily communication for a while with Suzanne Plummer and Steve Hale, who kind of built the front end of the Zen core, and the Colorado team. It was really good people. Mike Clark's a great architect, so we had a lot of fun, and success. Success has a lot of authors - failure has one. So that was a success. Then some teams stepped up - we moved Excavator to the Boston team, where they took over finishing the design and the physical stuff, Harry Fair and his guys did a great job on that. So there were some fairly stressful organizational changes that we did, going through that. The team all came together, so I think there was a lot of camaraderie in it. So I won't claim to be the ‘father’ - I was brought in, you know, as the instigator and the chief nudge, but part architect part transformational leader. That was fun.
If Intel only had a competitive advantage during that era because they traded performance for security, was there ever really an advantage?
I personally don't think Gelsinger is going to be able to fix their culture issues. He's been more intent on pumping stock and asking for handouts than innovating, which is part of what got them where they are in the first place, for good or ill.
Security is important, I would always prefer a secure product. But given design habits that elide security for performance, as well as a compromised supply chain, the only choice we have is to side with the devil(s) we know.
Even with longer fulfillment timelines, availability isn't necessary worth the surprise cost of competitiveness.
Lifecycling early and having to buy additional hardware to meet capacity was passed onto our customers.
After being ahead of Intel in the Pentium 4 era. The problem back then was marketing and giant amount of (probably illegal now) bundling that was rampant back then.
AMD had to make a much better product to get manufacturers to consider it, not just being price competitive. It took the P4 train wreck to get the market to shift but Intel had enough lock-in to make it to the Core generation without losing too much market share because so many of the vendors had those contracts.
Thunderbird was released in 1999 and from there to the Core 2 Duo release in 2006, AMD was the performance leader (certainly at a huge discount compared to intel offerings).
Their top performance was lower than Intel in many cases, but it was certainly not "absolute garbage". For low- to mid-range they offered similar performance with usually a (much) lower price point. For normal "average person" usage they were often the better choice in terms of "bang for your buck".
The main reason we were selling Intels is because we got a rebate from Intel for every CPU we sold. Financially it didn't really matter if we sold a €400 computer, €500, or €600 computer: the profit margin for us was roughly identical (a little bit more, but not much), but with Intel you got a rebate back-channelled, so then it did matter.
Intel can build ARMs and RISC-Vs as well as anybody. Harder will be adapting their salespeople to non-monopoly conditions.
The CPU is great. It’s power envelope and performance feel amazing.
My biggest complaint is the there is a very limited selection of Laptops with AMD’s chips, especially the top tier. The one I bought required me to replace the Wifi/Bluetooth card (it came with a barely “supported” MediaTek one) for Linux.
I have my gripes with MacOS after years of linux/windows usage, but responsiveness on M1 is not one of them.
I have turned off the genie effect and perhaps other animations, but my Ubuntu on my Lenovo still feels faster than the Mac.
It’s a more traditional style than a Unibody, sure. But it’s fine.
Lenovo's is the only one I find with 16" 3840x2400 OLED, but just a 6850, $2800. Or with 6950 but just 1920x1200, $2635. None with both. Advantage, Radeon R6500M GPU. Doesn't say which wifi it has.
https://www.lenovo.com/us/en/search?fq=&text=21D4000HUS
Dell has a 17" 6900HX, 4k, 32G RAM, RX6850 GPU, $2800. Or 6800H and RX6700, $2550. Mediatek MT7921 wifi...
https://www.dell.com/en-us/work/shop/dell-laptops/alienware-...
But I swore never to buy another Lenovo. Or Dell. Hoping I won't have to swear off ASUS too.
Build quality is excellent, but the first one died after 2 days: charge light wouldn't even go on. Waiting for #2. Wish me luck!
If they had tried to force the P4 mobiles instead of rethinking and retooling the PIII core with some of the P4's FSB innovations and other things, they probably wouldn't of had as competitive mobile processors and maybe wouldn't have dethroned AMD a few years later.
The Ryzen chips are already clocking over 3 GHz, so there isn't much more scaling from power left. That's why 5nm Zen4 probably won't move the needle too much.
Surprising results. Definitely not in the "very far" range.
Keep in mind the 6850U you're comparing against has a fan too. Notebookcheck says it has a 40W turbo on the gen 2 model, and the gen 3 Intel version has a 28W sustained boost. An M2 uses around 20W.
Also, a lot of those benchmarks are showing all x86 CPUs with a 3x+ lead, which indicates software optimization problems. Geekbench 5 is optimized for both arm64 and x86 and shows the M2 ahead of the 6800U. There are also just broken results like the LC0 test where the M1 is substantially faster than the M2. Overall, your results don't seem very valid.
> Overall, your results don't seem very valid.
They're not "my" results, and thermals were not part of the discussion.
Regarding performance, if one wants to be rigorous (and that's why I didn't state "68xx is faster than Mx"), one can't make absolute claims either way, as Torvalds himself has criticized Geekbench.
I still think that describing the performance difference as "not very far" is a valid assessment.
Fans spinning all the time and no way of disabling this madness.
Nearly the same for my Mac colleagues. They maybe get 2 hours out of their M1 MBPs unplugged.
So I'm faced with having to log out and power off every day or suck up the cost of keeping the laptop on. /r/maliciouscompliance, here I come I suppose.
Tempted to get one of these: https://us.amazon.com/Vegamax-Button-Ethernet-Internet-Netwo...
But these laptops were in bags, the last thing I wanted was a mac to start a house fire by heating up in a bag, so fuck that.
We disabled sleep to improve battery life and address a personal safety issue. There are many failure scenarios between various builds of Windows 10 and shitty drivers. Devices often wake up in bags and spin up fans until dead.
Normal scenario is that the battery is dead in the morning. In one case, it melted the compartment material in a bag and was deemed a safety hazard.
Problem solved.
When did this become a chore? I do this as standard and imo all people should. SSD Boot times these days are mostly under a minute and you get a fresh desktop every time.
EDIT: In fact I am one of the sysadmins which so many seem to despise on here. I have hybrid sleep and fast startup disabled by group policy on all my windows domain networks. It reduces so many support tickets by just actually having machines properly rebooted every night. Without this, people contact IT for glitches and bugs in their system, and when you look at the system uptime it is years!
In addition to the obvious browser I typically have an IDE, a few terminal windows, email, a few communication clients (due to internal and customer choices, not mine), and usually one or two database clients open at most times. Some of those restore their state nicely while others don't. Some of the terminal windows have e.g. a particular set of terminals at certain directories because I need to keep track of and work on multiple source repos at the same time.
Starting all of those from scratch every day would indeed be a chore. Perhaps more importantly, having my desktop be the way I left it also automatically reminds me what I was doing and helps continue from where I was.
A fresh desktop every morning would be a misfeature for me and would annoy and frustrate me immensely if forced on me.
I do of course reboot now and then for system updates etc., and I don't mind that.
There might be a decent rationale for forcing a reboot or disabling sleep on non-tech office devices if the staff are technically unskilled, but this is HN, so it's not much of a surprise if people aren't keen.
The year is $CURRENT_YEAR, needing to reboot a system should be regarded as a last resort and a relic of the past. No matter how much effort you dump into making apps remember their state when they're closed, it will always be strictly inferior to just dumping RAM to disk.
edit: i would legitimately quit a company that made me reboot every single night.
Be aware I am in a corporate environment, with all non technical users, and all services online.
I guess I'll have to add this to my questions to ask at job interviews. Admins like you these days sure try to make our lives as horrible as possible. Corporate anti-virus, DNS interception and policies like these turn my machine into something I constantly want to throw out the window.
All because you are too lazy to ask a person to reboot if the machine has high uptime.
Nothing to do with laziness. As other people have often mentioned on HN, in the real world of understaffed underbudget corporate IT you need to do what you can to enforce things which make everybodies life easier.
It might very well be that it is preferable to the organization as a whole to sacrifice a bit of productivity everywhere for less burden on IT. But IMHO it should not be a decision which the IT department can make in isolation.
If you are disabling things by policy, it should be after a discourse with your users and a serious attempt at training. Being a GPO dictator is an anti-pattern.
Policies such as yours are tremendously user hostile, and they are a reflection of the company's culture. I would probably not quit such a company, but I would certainly go rouge by either bringing my own equipment, or reinstalling the OS. If reprimanded, then I would quit.
I don't think this means what you think it means. I'm not a dev, but a mechanical engineer, and having to shutdown nightly, and reopen things the next morning, would cost the company at least an hour of my work time every week.
The frontline IT guys aren’t able to deal with shit like that, so a draconian policy comes top down.
If the laptop crashes more than once a week, I simply won't use it. If I worked at your company, I'd just BYOD, and keep your garbage laptop in a drawer, only booting for compliancy crap (and certainly not leaving it on long enough to download updates).
I've actually done this at a previous job or two. It was fine. Both (large behemoth) companies ended up cratering, at least partially due to chasing away competent employees with boneheaded corporate policies.
Office? Gitlab? Jira? Confluence? Any code at all? Adobe Experience Cloud? Any Google Service? Adobe Creative Cloud? Our Time and Expenses Tooling?
All locked behind SSO with EPM enforced. Additionally nearly all internal resources are only accessible via VPN. And guess what - only usable on EPM devices.
When I started I received a device, SDD encrypted me being root. After being acquired by big corp we now are in compliance world. Parts of that would have come regardless of big corp due to client requirements.
But a lot of this is quite taxing.
Why should I? Not long ago, my laptop had uptime of over half a year.
[Edit: Oh, "windows domain networks"? I guess perhaps that explains your propensity for rebooting?]
It's crazy to think you have these opposing teams of engineers, the Apple ones working away to optimise like crazy to reduce power consumption and the compliance software teams thinking up new ways to profligately use more.
Carbon Black probably needs some adjustments, or they need to spec laptops better. That sounds pretty intense and unnecessary.
With those tools running, builds take over an hour if they complete at all. With the tools disabled, builds complete in under a minute.
Horrid piece of software. I don't know when this sort of office-abuse became the norm but it makes me very sour about our industry as a whole.
Fuck this company, one of my wife’s jobs is BYOD but requires GlobalProtect for their VPN. After the software has been running for a few hours, even disconnected, it just starts chewing CPU cycles and grinds her M1 MacBook to a halt.
The only way to terminate it is via `defaults write` command in the terminal. It’s basically malware.
I sudo turn off the garbage and I haven’t been caught yet.
Cinebench is a great benchmark if you use Cinema4D, which I asumme 99.99% of the people buying these laptops won't use. Cinema4D is a niche of a niche.
Geekbench is far more representative of what kind of performance you can expect from a CPU.
https://reddit.com/r/hardware/comments/pitid6/eli5_why_does_...
Geekbench is an even worse benchmark than cinebench. It's extremely heavily influenced by the underlying OS rather than the hardware being compared.
Cinebench 1T and mT at least actually benchmark the hardware.
And to put those blender numbers in comparison https://prodesigntools.com/number-of-creative-cloud-subscrib...
How so?
For people that code, it also correlates poorly with parallel code compilation.
You can say the same about gaming. It's tops in Cinebench and most games. Therefore Cinebench and gaming must have a high correlation? No.
It could be fun to have a `lap benchmark`. That is can you keep a laptop on your lap while it runs Cinebench R23 for 10 minutes? With TB disabled, I can.
Another interesting ARM system is Nvidia's Jetson AGX Orin DevKit, which clocks in at (GB5: single: 763 / multi: 7193) [3]. That system is linux native right now, but of course isn't a laptop form factor.
[1]: https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/15575694 [2]: https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-5.20-SoCs-8cx-Gen3-Arm [3]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KrZt90c_-C8 (sorry for the video link)
EDIT: Also confirmed that WSL2 runs natively on Win11 ARM. So you can have an optimized full Linux kernel running on the Thinkpad as well.
Don't forget 12th gen Intel CPUs have a lot more cores than 11th gen Intel CPUs. That's where the significant benchmark improvements are coming from. Unfortunately though, these often don't reflect the real world use case. Having more cores isn't going to improve the day-to-day performance very much. The new efficiency cores probably improve battery life though
Without TB, I'm down to 8x 2.4, which is a bit sluggish.
edit: My laptop has a i7-12700H, which uses more power than the cpu in the framework laptop.
More thoughts: The laptop is pretty much always plugged in. When I'm out I carry a little 60W charger with me.
However for other reasons I wouldn't recommend the XPS 17. I have a Lenovo legion 7 at home that I'm more happy with (cheaper, better performance, lots of ports, etc)
Last week, on my M1 MBP, I spent an hour in a Teams (Electron!) call while off power and battery went from 99% to 96%.
Intel needs to match that to even be in the game for portables IMO.
If they invested in contributing Linux drivers they'd probably be able to takeover the market for developers. Asahi is slowly improving, but it doesn't feel ready yet to be someone's sole daily machine.
Ultimately my M1 MBP sits on the shelf collecting dust, except for occasional testing. My smaller and lighter Intel laptop already gets 8 hours of battery life which is more than enough for me, and has perfect Linux support.
And I just bought a maxed out XPS 13 Plus, which I generally like.
The macOS UI is bit annoying and the fact that you have to install tiny apps like to have a separate trackpad and mouse scrolling direction is not ideal, but yeah it's all dwarfed by the fact I finally can't hear any fans and performance is just as good as plugged in. I can't remember when I last time had a laptop on a sofa without having to worry about the charger and getting laps uncomfortably hot.
At least it did when I still used macOS on portables. Now I only have a mini left for work
Scroll reverser allows you to set them up separately.
This may have been true when the M1 was just released, but the gap both in performance and power consumption is shrinking. And that's with the competition still being one process node behind.
I don’t care how fast it is as long as it continues to have those mediocre low travel keyboards. They’re better than their worst keyboards from the 2018 era but they still aren’t good
I always consider the built-in keyboard as a sort of emergency/convenience tool.
I'm on ArchLinux with a window manager and no desktop whatsoever. I also disabled the GPU. I wonder if there is something draining your battery on the background.
Meanwhile in a server, I'm starting to worry that as I work to flush performance issues out of the system, especially latency problems, that I won't see the sort of perf numbers I'm expecting because the fact that the machines are running well below 50% CPU utilization are likely to dogleg the moment it hits the thermal limits, and I have no way to predict that, short of maybe collecting CPU temperature telemetry. Not only might my changes not translate into 1:1 or even 1.2:1 gains, they might be zero gains and or just raise the CPU utilization.
Magical CPU utilization also takes away one of the useful metrics for autoscaling servers. Thermal throttling opens the door to outsized fishtailing scenarios.