Apple M2 vs. AMD Ryzen 7 Pro 6850U Performance in Nearly 200 Benchmarks
phoronix.com
phoronix.com
1. The Ryzen setup has twice the ram
2. The Ryzen setup has twice the cpu cores
3. The Ryzen setup has 3x the power envelope (in watts) as the M2[1]
4. They are using Asahi Linux on the M2.[2]
Too bad I missed the window to downvote.
If this said: Apple M2 (Linux/8gb/4c) vs. Ryzen 7 Pro 6850U (Linux/16gb/8c)... it would have been more honest, and potentially interesting, as it would also be an indication of the progress of Asahi Linux.
(edited to add line breaks)
[1]: Ryzen 46w (not sure if this includes the GPU) vs M2 15w (not sure if this includes the GPU)
[2]: Asahi Linux is super cool, but most M2 chips in the wild are not running it. So it's not a useful comparison.
The Ryzen chip's TDP is configurable between 15W and 28W, which would include the GPU (but I doubt most of these tests touch the GPU anyhow). There will be power usage differences, but the TDP difference won't be huge - most differences will be due to utilization differences, which might be large.
The RAM issue usually doesn't affect most benchmarks, but it's something to consider if there are odd outliers.
The CPU core count number represents the reality of these chips (but M2 has a 4+4 config, apparently?).
Using linux is likely far from ideal, but probably necessary for them to run such an extensive and mostly comparable set of benchmarks. It's a significant caveat, but for CPU-limited benchmarks it's hopefully merely of reasonably limited impact (on the order of 30% on average rather than 300%, say?). OS differences tend to be larger for I/O, GPU, and some niche things like context-switching benchmarks. Of course, the power scheduler stuff matters.
It's worth pointing out that phoronix itself (on different hardware and slightly older OS versions) looked at some linux vs. macos benchmarks: https://www.phoronix.com/review/apple-m1-linux-perf - and while there were a few unsurprising macos wins, there also were some (far fewer) linux wins.
I think the benchmark is very interesting for what it is. Despite limitations, it _is_ informative. You can't always get a shrinkwrapped answer to whatever question you really have; so extra data-points such as this are helpful.
You know what they say: there are lies, damn lies, and benchmarks. Or something like that; caveat lector anyhow.
Also, all benchmarks flawed, some are useful. This one is definitely useful.
M1 maxed out at 22w according to Anandtech and the max shouldn't be too much different for the M2.
When running stress-ng, measured with turbostat:
- 4.18 GHz single thread consuming 9W
- 3 GHz 16 threads consuming 25W, ramping down to 2.94 / 23W after a couple of seconds
and when compiling Linux on 16 threads it stays at 2.85 GHz / 23W
In performance mode it does run at 80 degC under sustained load, so usually when undocked I just leave it in balanced mode where it's capped at 20W short / 15W long
Also worth noting is that in low-power mode (11W / 11W) it'll still hit max single core frequency possible.
(Note that this is SoC package power instead of the full laptop though, but that is pretty typical, so no idea what the 22W was for comparison.)
The 4800U hit north of 65w in a NUC device[0]. The 5800U hits 52w in a laptop[1]. AMD runs their chips hot.
TSMC N6 is a 7nm++ node. The even more advanced 5nm node only offers either 15% performance increase OR 30% power reduction vs N7. The 6850 clocks 10% higher, so the power shouldn't be dropping AT ALL.
The 6850H has an identical turbo clockspeed of 4.7GHz and a TDP of 45w with real-world power consumption according to other reviewers being north of 65w. The base clocks for these chips is 2.7 and 3.5GHz respectively.
In the case that they really are getting those numbers, they are certainly only at base clockspeeds (2.7GHz) which raises the impossible question of how Zen 3 suddenly got such a huge performance per clock advantage going from desktop to mobile.
The numbers simply do not add up.
[0] https://www.anandtech.com/show/16236/asrock-4x4-box4800u-ren...
[1] https://www.notebookcheck.net/R7-5800U-vs-E-2186M-vs-R7-PRO-...
https://www.anandtech.com/show/16214/amd-zen-3-ryzen-deep-di...
When you look at per-core performance of desktop chips, things aren't rosy. Looking at the 5950 (most power efficient per core), it's taking almost 7.5w PER CORE to hit 3.7GHz. It hits 4.7GHz (peak frequency of 6850U) on just 4 cores while using 110w to do it. That's almost 23w per core.
Based on these numbers, taking 8 cores up to 3.7GHz would require 60w of power and that's just to hit the "base" frequencies of the 6850H which they say can be done with a TDP 25% lower than that (maybe dropping half the L3 cache makes that possible, but at an overall performance loss as moving stuff from RAM takes more energy than keeping it in L3 and I don't know that losing half the cache saves more energy than the addition of a GPU adds back to the chip).
Even if we assume a 12% energy efficiency bump (two thirds of the 18% transistor reduction and roughly inline with the 30% efficiency at N5 with a 45% transistor reduction), we aren't doing anything multithreaded anywhere near peak frequency. In fact, we aren't doing anything multithreaded past those terrible 2.7GHz base clocks at best.
Meanwhile, the M2 TDP didn't really increase. They can hit 3.5GHz on 4 cores while using 60% less energy than those AMD cores at 3.7GHz despite being about twice as wide and over 60% faster per clock. Back of the envelope calculations seem to indicate that 4 M2 big cores at 3.5GHz should be more than 2x as fast as 8 Zen 3 cores at 2.7GHz without even using little cores and completely ignoring Amdahl's Law.
Of course, all this just goes back to the question of how questionable this entire article really is.
The intel competition in the form of alder lake scales for much longer if you just pump more juice into it. Scaling varies from chip to chip.
Edit - I might be misremembering, because 6900HS's sweet spot was at 20W: https://www.anandtech.com/show/17276/amd-ryzen-9-6900hs-remb... But anyhow, they also noted that "going from 50 W to 80 W is a 60% power increase for only +375 MHz and only +7.7% increased score in the benchmark".
But TL;DR: 15-28W probably really is the ideal range for a chip like this. Which won't stop ODMs from pushing well beyond that, of course.
Furthermore note there is a difference between SoC package power and power pulled from the wall. That depends on the rest of the device, but 5-10W isn't unreasonable. (So e.g. at 22W package power, pulling ~32W from battery is pretty common). Looking at the detailed graph in the NUC review, that difference is particularly large though, the package only pulls <20W in steady state and maybe 30W at boost[0], but this device somehow seems to have significant power draw coming from somewhere else, this is pretty atypical wrt laptops & battery draw at least.
I'm not sure what performance per clock advantage going from desktop to mobile you're referring to? The mobile chips are slower due to the lower max boost and power limits, but due to non-linear power scaling it tends to be not that* much worse than the desktop parts.
As an aside I find the Anandtech Zen3 review[1] a pretty good resource when I want to have a clue about reasonable clock/power expectations on zen3 (though it is only a single workload)
(Also not sure where the 52W claim comes from, my searching on the linked page seems to yield no results?)
*: With the notable exception that pre-6000 series AMD had some horrible delay clocking up the cores when on battery, hitting short tests like geekbench. That said even on AC the chips should be adhering to configured power limits.
[0] https://images.anandtech.com/doci/16236/wm-aida_power.png [1] https://www.anandtech.com/show/16214/amd-zen-3-ryzen-deep-di...
What is missing in that story? Is it more likely that a mystery chip is dissipating 40w into that tiny chassis or that something isn't reported correctly?
Perhaps the answer is something to do with the chipset using a massive 40w of power. That isn't likely as even the actively-cooled desktop chipsets don't use that much power. Even if that's true, not only does the dissipation issue still go unanswered, but the SoC it is being compared to also moves everything on-chip, so adding in that power consumption is necessary for an equal comparison.
There's no suitable answer to this problem other than the reported numbers being wrong.
> I'm not sure what performance per clock advantage going from desktop to mobile you're referring to?
M2 peak performance at 3.5GHz is equal or better than desktop Zen 3 chips running at 5+GHz.
The second link you post shows the 5950X (with the best binned chiplets with the lowest power/core numbers) requiring 7.5w per core at 3.7GHz. That means you could barely get HALF your cores running at 3.7GHz at 30w. All of them at that speed (1GHz less than turbo) would take around 60w of power (by the way, 6850H has a 45w TDP and claims base clocks of 3.7GHz, so something doesn't quite match up there either).
Even hitting 8 cores at 2.7GHz seems to be a stretch within that 28w TDP limit. EPYC with it's top-binned chiplets requires around 4-4.5w per core to hit 2.45GHz base clocks.
Adding between 700MHz and 1GHz to the clockspeed plus a well-known 60% faster per clock design plus cutting cache in half for Zen 3 mobile (which increases total power usage too) makes the benchmark results super fishy as they would require massive increases in IPC (or massive crippling of the M2 chip). This is of course not true, which indicates something is wrong somewhere.
Anecdotally, my work laptop has a previous-generation Ryzen 7 5850U (8 cores, 16 logical) in a 14-inch ThinkPad chassis. I just tried a 16-thread xz compression on it a few times and eyeballed the average power use with powertop. The baseline power with no load (except for what little idle load there was from whatever I had open) of the entire system was around 5 W with display brightness at a minimum. The battery discharge rate rose to between 21.5 and 22.5 watts for the couple of minutes the compression took.
This was on battery since I had no tools for monitoring power use at hand otherwise. (Turbostat reports detailed per-core and per-package wattage from the CPU at least on Intel but the distro I've got for work apparently doesn't have that packaged and I'm not going to be hunting for a source package for this.)
However, the compression took pretty much exactly the same amount of time on AC, so I doubt having it on battery affected CPU clock rates significantly.
A 13" laptop chassis would also have serious trouble getting rid of 50 or 60 watts of prolonged heat production from the CPU.
Also, where did you get the 52 watts in a laptop figure? The only reference to 52 on that page w.r.t the 5800U that I can find is a results of 51.9 points per watt, whatever those points are, in some kind of a power efficiency test. The power consumption test above that reports 42.9 watts, measured with an external monitor, so probably including more than the CPU. I also can't immediately find a reference to what kind of a chassis the CPU was in, laptop or otherwise.
> raises the impossible question of how Zen 3 suddenly got such a huge performance per clock advantage going from desktop to mobile
What kind of a PPC increase did Zen 3 get going mobile? I've only read about PPC comparisons between Zen 2 and Zen 3.
This is Phoronix. Using Linux is the whole point, that's their audience.
Hats off to phoronix; it's not meant as a criticism - just an expectation that the benchmark results may not satisfy everyone.
That said people pick different manufactures for their next device all the time (at least in the Linux/Windows world) and having performance comparison for these devices on your favorite system helps you choose.
TDP isn't a relevant number since the Ryzens will exceed their "configured TDP" for an unlimited period of time.
see, eg, Anandtech's Tiger Lake review where a "15W cTDP" Renoir chip pulls 23W, and it is allowed to sustain that boost for an unlimited period of time, going against Intel chips that actually obey the 15W configured sustained-power limits...
https://images.anandtech.com/doci/16084/Power%20-%2015W%20Co...
The relevant number for comparing Ryzen against Intel/Apple SKUs is what AMD calls the "PPT" which is their sustained-boost TDP. The "cTDP" number is basically pure marketing these days, nobody is running at base clocks outside of contrived scenarios.
(the Intel boost TDP is allowed to exceed the rated TDP too, but they only allow it for a limited time, it's a "sprint" feature on their chips, where AMD has just turned it into their new sustained TDP number, with the advertised TDP being essentially fake for marketing purposes it's specified at base-clocks that nobody ever runs.)
I don't know the figures for lenovo's thinkpad, which is why I quoted the full range AMD offers. And even then, TDP is just a long term target for the purposes of cooling - workload, implementation and environmental (i.e. temperature) details might leave two chips with identical TDPs to nevertheless consume vastly different amounts of energy.
In any case, we simply don't know how much power these systems used under this load. The expectation certainly is that the AMD system used more, but it's not clear how much more.
Phoronix should have measured how long each notebook could run the benchmark suite sustained and scaled the benchmark results accordingly.
updated wording.
While these things are interrelated you actually want both pieces of data and you don't want them complected by using them to forge some number made entirely useless and incomparable by incorporating both facets in one useless whole.
To you and all the rest saying the same: do you really think that when trying to judge a processor speed you should run benchmarks with different OSes? So, why not benchmark Lenovo + Windows vs MacBook + macOS? Those are the most sold configurations for both laptops, no? To me, it makes sense try to compare the raw HW with the same layer of software, unless there is some big glaring missing feature in Linux, inhibiting the use of some HW capability of the M2 processor.
As far as the mismatched CPU and whatnot... These are the same sort of CPUs that you can get in the same form factor at around the same price.
So the comparison is valid.
The only thing suspect is the 8 vs 16GB of RAM. But since these are CPU-bound benchmarks I don't know how much of a actual difference that will make.
Phoronix regularly benchmarks across OSs.
Type "Windows" into the search bar in the top right. Example: https://www.phoronix.com/review/windows-linux-mid22adl
The memory difference might be addressed with the `mem=8G` Linux kernel boot parameter.
Considering the context, they probably wanted apple to clearly win and not just be basically on par or slightly behind.
Often these people aren't even aware of this themselves.
I found the stats to be missing the most important datapoint for laptops however. If performance/wattage is irrelevant you really don't need a laptop after all, and they're even using the low energy /underperforming ryzen chipset...
I know they couldn't get the data from the drivers on Linux, unfortunate nonetheless.
Note that it is possible to basically overclock the chip and raise this limit up to around 50W for the combo GPU/CPU if you really want to. This requires enhancing the cooler as shown in [0] and no OEM does that out of the box.
TDP does not represent the power envelope of the chips. It's the sustained load target at best, but mostly even that is kinda made up and the rules don't matter. But for any short (where short is less than a minute or even 5 minutes) burst, that TDP figure is completely irrelevant. Nothing respects it. Also for single threaded tasks, neither one is even going to pull that high.
You have to compare actual power used during the specific test in question to make any such comparison. Otherwise trying to judge power consumption by looking at TDP is like trying to judge performance by only looking at clock speeds. Within the same manufacturers same generation you can kinda infer something useful. Other than that? Not a chance.
That said in this case it is a small difference regardless. The 6850U's TDP per AMD's spec is 15W-28W. That's bang on the same as M2 basically. There's no 3x difference here. Unless there is because again TDP is a made up number with no formal definition.
That's hardly apples to apples..
That's a sweepingly broad claim that's not at all well supported. AMD & Intel both make CPUs that top out far below 50-60w real-world power and also top out far, far above 50-60W real-world power.
From a different review of the same CPU (didn't check if same laptop, could be though) "The Ryzen 7 PRO 6850U with the Linux 5.18 kernel had a 18.4 Watt average (or 16.6 Watt average with Linux 5.19 Git) while the Ryzen 7 PRO 5850U average on Linux 5.18 was up at 21.96 Watts." https://www.phoronix.com/review/amd-ryzen7-6850u/8
So no, this isn't a 50-60W real-world power CPU. That's the non-U SKUs.
But if this AMD was a 50-60W CPU that'd exactly prove my point that TDP is a stupid number to compare and you always, always have to look at actual power consumption used (which this M2 vs. 6850U didn't do because as noted briefly in the intro power monitoring of the M2 doesn't work on Asahi yet)
TSMC N5 only offers 15% performance OR 30% lower power vs 7nm. Peak clocks on the 6850U are 10% higher than the 5xxx generation AND is on N6 instead of N5 which offers a significantly lower advantage than what I stated. N6 offers an 18% reduction in area vs N7 while N5 offers a 45% reduction in area, so you can do your math from there.
https://www.anandtech.com/show/16236/asrock-4x4-box4800u-ren...
https://www.notebookcheck.net/R7-5800U-vs-E-2186M-vs-R7-PRO-...
If the TDP is only configurable up to 28w, but they're pulling almost 70w total system power (when there's simply no other real power users in the entire system), then there's a serious problem with their default "average" power usage not respecting TDP in any real way.
A lot of AMD laptops have historically dropped 30+% of their performance when you unplug them (a notable example would be the MS Surface 4s) so they can look better than they really are as reviewers tend to be lazy about this and test performance while plugged in then do a rundown test to push out a "review" within the couple day window they can still make ad money.
Comparing to other Zen 3 chips (I've gone into that elsewhere in this thread), top-binned EPYC uses 4-4.5w per core to do 2.45GHz base clocks (that's 32-36w for 8 cores at ~2.5GHz while they claim base clocks of 2.7GHz). If you lower that max TDP even further, those clocks go down even farther.
I disliked when Intel started going with TDP as a recommendation rather than a limit 15 years ago. I disliked when AMD followed suit so they wouldn't seem to be at a disadvantage (well, at less of a disadvantage as they were getting crushed at that time). I dislike the M2 Air which throttles back rather quickly.
The only good thing in recent times has been Intel's 12th gen adding a peak power consumption metric (no doubt because the difference between that and their normal TDP would have basically guaranteed a lawsuit).
> Why are you using peek instead of average?
Many (most) benchmarks are short-lived, but people infer long-term performance from these.
If a chip is getting N marks at 60w, long-term performance where power adjusts down to 30-40w isn't going to be anywhere close to that number.
M1/M2 when actively cooled can run at peak clocks/performance all the time. This means that performance expectations are in line with what reviews show. This is good for consumers (and they need to be more upfront about the air thermal throttling).
This laptop actually uses 28W TDP, so TDP is 2x not 3x which is still significant in less than 60 seconds.
It's also interesting that the maximum power consumption eked out of the Ryzen 7 Pro 6850U was a touch under 32W. Where did this 46W number of the parent comment come from? Or the 50-60W in the comment below? They must be thinking of a different CPU/APU.
Other than power management support, the progress of Asahi doesn't really impact CPU performance.
> Asahi Linux is super cool, but most M2 chips in the wild are not running it. So it's not a useful comparison.
Clearly this is aimed at an audience who wants to run Asahi. It's a perfectly useful comparison for that.
Prices weren't mentioned, but I suspect the prices of the two systems being benchmarked were similar. (Edit: I take that back, the AMD system looks considerably more expensive - it would be interesting to see a more price-matched comparison)
Maybe these benchmarks aren't useful for you personally, but I think a lot of people (myself included) consider it to be an interesting and useful comparison.
Linux can't make use of half of the specialized chips and functions in the M2.
I suppose, if someone needed an article to learn that M2 hardware isn't needed for linux, you have your confirmation. But was that ever in question?
Then again, there are some features supported by Asahi but not macos https://twitter.com/marcan42/status/1556297295838453760
The goal of the benchmark is to run the two exact same binaries, not to make one that uses all of Apple's ARM extensions and one with AVX-512 to see who can go fastest in the best conditions.
Calling into a system BLAS library might, but most benchmarks wouldn't do that.
(the 6800u ~= 6850u unless you're deploying them en masse in the enterprise, in which case there's extra management features in the Ryzen pro that the Mac doesn't have)
https://p4-ofp.static.pub/fes/cms/2022/04/20/j7rnbsqww5svxas...
https://p2-ofp.static.pub/fes/cms/2022/03/17/14ph1afu8vmtli8...
The better build quality amounts to black paint, a trackball, and clicky buttons on the trackpad.
Furthermore, price matters when comparing price to performance, not when, say, nerfing a benchmark by running one chip with twice as much RAM.
This statement is not even wrong, in the sense that it is nonsensical. If you intended to say that the RAM is integrated on chip, that is incorrect. Apple marketing made that statement early on, but teardowns very clearly show that the RAM is soldered on package, not on integrated on chip. This is still a leap forward in power from other common devices, but a much smaller one than integrating the RAM on the chip.
Furthermore, the RAM on M2 is bog-standard SK Hynix LPDDR5. 2x 32gbit chips for the 8GB model, 2x 64gbit for the 16GB model, and 2x 96gbit for the 24GB model. I can buy the exact same chips that are used in 16GB Macbook Air for ~$70 each, and I am not Apple.
If the SKUs had the same level of markup, the price difference between 8GB and 16GB would be less than $50.
Makes me think of licensed trades. Anything a plumber or electrician installs for me will be significantly marked up from what I could buy it for myself.
So, it's not a comparison of the processors. If they selected them based on price point, form factor or something else, then that should be stated.
That may explain why is crushes Apple on some benchmarks. I wonder what causes Apple to crush Ryzen on other ones. This was the strangest comparison I've ever seen with large wins going to both contenders.
It skews the numbers and makes a good comparison really annoying to do, unless you do your own comparison on your own workloads.
It might be the same C, it might have hand-coded assembly for important bits in x86 but not in ARM, or vice versa, it might be just one specific algorithm executes particularly well on one CPU rather than the other, it might be that the slightly different version of GCC did a new optimisation.
edit: they're also comparing an actively cooled laptop to a passive one - so you would expect M2 to throttle in longer benchmarks, for extra distortion.
The methodology is flawed. It lets you cherry pick some individual results, and if your particular usecase is in there, great. But you don't know what state the M2 was in when a test started (eg if it was already hot and throttling, etc).
It's basically impossible to draw any useful generalised conclusions from these benchmarks.
I think you misunderstood. "GNU Radio" on M2 was sometimes screamingly fast, and sometimes embarrassingly slow, depending on which test it was.
I'm not saying that "GNU Radio" was the same on M2 and AMD, obviously it's not. I'm saying the performance results for GNU Radio specifically were insanely inconsistent - M2 won by a stupidly huge amount in one of the GNU radio results, and AMD by an equally absurd margin in the other GNU radio results.
Same "GNU Radio" compiled binary on the respective platforms, huge swings in performance depending on what that binary was doing.
There were a couple other similar examples, where performance for the same program swung wildly depending on the exact task.
If you're looking for a "general" comparison, there is none. General usage of a laptop computer for who? What do you consider general usage? What exactly are you looking for? For 99% of what people do, they won't even be able to tell apart a Celeron from an M2.
Why do you think we have things like discreet GPUs? You buy certain hardware for certain tasks.
Or do you just want to say that your CPU is better than someone else's? Who gives a shit? That's really all you get from a "general" performance review, a bunch of vague crap.
This review was great. It shows what Linux users can expect under certain workloads on two laptops that cost the same amount of money. You can then decide which one is best for you as a Linux user who may be interested in an M2.
They don't know what state the M2 was in at the start of each test (because the hw monitoring support isn't there yet), and this is a system that is known to thermally throttle, so the individual results are potentially flawed too.
The laptops don't cost the same amount. This is comparing an $1100 laptop to an $1800 laptop.
FWIW, I don't actually care which is faster (I own both AMD and Apple hardware that I use for different things) - I just think the review is flawed.
4 performance cores and 4 efficiency cores.
(edit): Granted 4 of the cores are lower powered "efficiency" cores, this is by no means equivalent to having just 4 cores
(aka big.LITTLE which is some strange branding.)
- 1. https://9to5mac.com/2022/06/26/m2-macbook-pro-slower-ssd/
* Radeon ROCm 5.2.3 Released (...)
* Mesa 22.2-rc3 Released (...)
* [bootloader project] Updated With Improved SMBIOS Support
* GCC 12.2 Compiler Released With 70+ Bug Fixes
As for the hardware, the Air is just the entry level model, and AFAICT the X13 they're using is roughly the same price as the Air. About as fair a comparison as you could make it. They also specifically call out the power thing:
> Due to the Apple M2 currently lacking any power/temperature sensor support under Linux, this is simply looking at the raw performance of the M2 and Ryzen 7 PRO 6850U with not being able to accurately compare the M2 power efficiency / performance-per-Watt at this time.
It's important to look at the context: Lenovo laptops have been a staple in the Linux world for a long time, and people in the Linux world are genuinely excited about the Apple Silicon laptops, hell even Linus is running Asahi. For the target audience, this comparison is exactly the benchmark they want.
saying "we can't measure the power on M2" isn't the same thing as pointing out that in broad terms the M2 is only using 1/3 of the power of the 6850U. These are really different power classes and yeah, you'd expect the processor with triple the power budget to pull ahead.
Triple isn't my number, but, Ryzen is allowed to boost extremely high during short tests like Phoronix is doing, where a MBA is always 15W max, period the end, even in max clock states.
15W is it's TDP, and various companies release chips that run at triple their TDP - including repeated by Apple in the past. Saying it's never going to exceed it's TDP is just blatantly ridiculous, and Phoronix were completely right in treating it as a useless number (which it is).
The only reliable way to measure power draw is either to monitor the exact voltages and amperages on each power lane - which is not made available by Apple - or wire into the motherboard. Anything else is not serious, least of all taxing the TDP to its word.
> 2. The Ryzen setup has twice the cpu cores
Why should this be held against the Ryzen? It was the competitive advantage that they had against Intel, and if Apple choose not to compete then it should be to their disadvantage. It's as ridiculous as this hypothetical argument:
> 1. The M2 is arm64.
CPU micro benchmarks aren't typically affected by memory quantity, especially at these levels.
> The Ryzen setup has twice the cpu cores
The Ryzen chip has eight homogeneous cores, the M2 has eight heterogeneous cores. [0] All else being equal, having high performance and low power cores in the same package _should_ result in better performance and efficiency.
I do note that the machine specs in the article show the M2 as having 4c/8t, so I wonder if there's an SMP issue in Asahi on the M2 currently? They don't make it clear if this is the case, or why all eight cores aren't being reported/used.
Doing some preliminary searching, it seems the M2 doesn't employ SMT, so perhaps this is misreported, or Asahi does something weird with scheduling.
> The Ryzen setup has 3x the power envelope (in watts) as the M2 > Ryzen 46w (not sure if this includes the GPU)
The 6850U is reported by the manufacturer as having a configurable TDP of 15-28W [1]. I believe this is total package power usage, so using either the CPU or GPU would allow better performance than maxing out both, and this probably applies to both chips. Some board/laptop manufacturers will also extend these limits, especially when plugged in, and design their cooling solutions to handle the increased power usage accordingly. Intel, for example, has published a TDP of 125W for some chips that can consume up to 230W while boosting [2]. I'm curious what both of these pull from the battery under load. I would expect the M2 to be more efficient, being manufactured on a newer, denser node.
> They are using Asahi Linux on the M2.
Any other comparison would be wholly meaningless. You (probably) can't run macOS on a Ryzen 6850U. Running benchmarks built by different compilers to run on different kernels wouldn't really be comparing the same thing.
In the end, this benchmark, while interesting, measures what it measures. The results should be taken with a grain of salt, and should not be extrapolated to predict the performance of other applications on these platforms.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_M2
[1] https://www.amd.com/en/products/apu/amd-ryzen-7-pro-6850u
[2] https://www.anandtech.com/show/16495/intel-rocket-lake-14nm-...
I don't see any value in this comparison. These processors are consuming vastly different amounts of power. Not only that, but they are using a passively cooled Macbook Air (ultraportable) and a nearly twice as thick, actively cooled Lenovo X13.
They are not even price equivalent: The base price of the X13 is $1,800 compared to $1,200 for the M2 Macbook Air. And they aren't even comparing base model to base model. They are comparing base model Macbook Air to a ~$2,500 X13 Lenovo that has been upgraded with additional memory and the faster processor.
So the Lenovo is twice as expensive, uses twice as much power, is actively vs passively cooled, and is twice as thick. What are we comparing?
No, I don't expect it accounts for the differences, but there's a ton of procedural flaws in this benchmark that make using the results for any purpose very tricky.
The other one that really concerns me is that the M2 was tested in the MBA. The MBA is thermally constrained and throttles. They have zero data on what temperatures it was (because it's not implemented yet!) so they don't know when/if the MBA was throttling in each test. The M2 MBP would have been a better comparison.
I'm wary of trying to draw any useful conclusions from this article about the M2's general performance vs the new Ryzen 6xxx lineup, the methodology is just too flawed.
If one wanted to know what the difference in performance per watt or per core it would be useful to constrain the matter but that isn't the most useful question for measuring performance.
Honestly I think the important takeaway is that both chips are in the same ballpark.
I don't see how Asahi is going to limit performance in those benchmarks.
TDP is a complete garbage metric and doesn't mean anything.
I think this is a more than fair comparison. They are both the high end, low power chips.
if Apple can advertise their findings and compare to desktop CPUs, then the TDP debate is completely pointless. moreover, each chip maker has their own way of calculating what they call "TDP".
to the intended reader (Linux users), this is a great guide to decide which options works best from actual performance standpoint.
The next generation Ryzen series (7000 series) looks like it's going to be absolutely insane. That window may end up being shorter then expected.
So Apple bought themselves a win, which makes perfect sense. And they had already chosen ARM for iOS (for historical reasons, really -- the original iPhone picked an off-the-shelf Samsung SOC), so that's what they dropped in the Mac.
But indeed, this is probably transitory. Eventually TSMC will either lose its lead or ramp its best processes to the point where other manufacturers can buy it. Already, as we see here, they're only mildly ahead of the rest of the pack.
But I do think there's a certain amount of kool aid being drunk by the Mac community about these chips. They're great. But maybe not insanely so.
[1] It's absolutely true that Apple's whole-system power integration story remains at the top of the industry. But that was true even when they weren't on the best process.
Sorry you are totally right and my phrasing was poor, what I was trying to say is that Apple's TSMC 7nm chips (A13) are still very competitive with Qualcomm and AMDs offerings on the same node. They beat out AMD (5000 series) on perf/w while tying perf and beat Qualcomm (865+) on perf handily with (iirc) similar wattage. M1 and M2 are certainly benefitting from TSMC 5nm compared to everyone else currently and AMD in particular is a lot closer than I think many Apple fans give credit.
A low power ARM MCU will kill anything in perf/watt. Performance gains aren't linear.
Apple's systems may very well end up being slower. From a business standpoint, I am not sure that will matter.
Neither AMD nor Intel have shown much indication of catching up to Apple's (well, ARM's) mobile device battery life advantage. Apple doesn't sell systems that go in data centers, they don't need to smoke anything.
When Apple was using PowerPC the number of PowerPC units shipped was tiny compared to the PC market.
The huge volumes of mobile devices that Apple now ship has got to at least help share R&D costs across product lines.
Consumers already know this. They'll buy the new Mac even if it's worse (see: 2016), the new iPhone even if it's slower (see: 2022), and the new Magic Mouse even if it's still broken. It doesn't matter how fast or slow the Mac is, Apple has long proven that they exist in a market segment of their own, for better or worse.
Essentially this was because PC volumes supported Intels R&D and investment being greater than anyone else could afford. We’re no longer in 2000 though. Apple sold 240 million iPhones last year which is not far off global PC sales. Meanwhile TSMC has overtaken Intel with a broader and growing product base whilst Intel is shrinking.
Note that their portable / consumer devices have always been ARM. Like, back to the Newton even.
Apple now makes their own chips. They've dealt with that vulnerability. And they're fully onboard the ARM bus in a big way and they've managed to bring their customer base with them without a lot of hassle.
Over the last 40 years Apple has been burned multiple times with having their key ISA be dropped by its manufacturer. 6502 became a deadend (quickly.) Motorola dropped the ball on the (relatively successful) 68k, and tried to get people onto the ill-fated 88k and then pulled the eject cord and everyone went PowerPC. That lasted maybe a decade and Motorola/Freescale&IBM started to flee the ship. I think Apple has learned their lesson. They don't want to be vulnerable on this front anymore.
That meant that the performance requirements of a laptop were simply never going to be IBM or Motorola’s priority. The last PowerPC Mac was the G5 tower, and that was an amazing case with incredible cooling setup because it needed it. The G5 used a ton of power, and generated insane amounts of heat (seriously those G5 heat sinks were larger than most pc gamer/modder heat sinks if there era, before considering the enormous airflow, and even a flow shroud. Simply put there was no way a G5 was ever going to be in a laptop that was actually portable.
That’s what led to Apple migrating to intel - intel at least was interested in consumer hardware, and portable computing as well.
So the important thing is that Apple’s own cpus are presumably always going to be aligned with what Apple wants, in a way that they can’t rely on others to do.
The only game in town that Intel/AMD can really play now is to make their chips cheaper and more palatable (reduce power consumption, offer better integrated GPUs, etc) for x86 based consumer products or slowly see Apple's share in the laptop market increase more and more.
But before we get to them, things we already know:
* You cannot buy Apple Silicon without buying a Mac (and you can't get the unique characteristics of a Mac and macOS without Apple Silicon)
* Apple Silicon is optimized for macOS (and vice versa)
* Apple Silicon is remarkably efficient (particularly under macOS)
This comparison, of course, is focused on Linux users. It is not going to determine some sort of ambiguously defined but ultimate superiority of silicon across all scenarios. However, if you use Linux on one of the laptops used to compare the CPUs, it can give you insight on performance for those specific use cases.
So what are the takeaways?
* The fan-less M2 (4p/4e) in the Air with 8GB performs about as well as an air-cooled 15-28W Ryzen 7 Pro 6850U (8p) with 16GB on average (and vice versa)
* The performance of the M2 is likely more than satisfactory despite Asahi Linux not being the absolute optimal operating system for the silicon
* The performance of the Ryzen is likely more than satisfactory despite lower efficiency compared to Apple Silicon
* Laptop APU performance in 2022 is really remarkable (even at these low TDPs), and any user (regardless of preferred OS or chosen CPU designer) will likely have a good experience with one of these high performing chips
I think running these benchmarks appeals to our curiosity about the state of hardware. It is not a perfect, controlled experiment, but it compares two real-world CPUs (APU and SoC respectively) and gives us insight into their performance given the actual hardware configurations tested.
What this does not tell us (again): that Ryzens are better than Apple Silicon, or vice versa, in all cases or in every metric. That if one CPU beats another CPU in some benchmarks, it's the one you want, regardless of all the other considerations you have to put into purchase decisions. That either of these CPUs are "bad".
It is actually quite possible that Apple's advantage was more about being on TSMC's 5nm before everyone else, than something intrinsic about their processor.
> The fan-less M2 (4p/4e) in the Air with 8GB performs about as well as an air-cooled 15-28W Ryzen 7 Pro 6850U (8p) with 16GB on average (and vice versa)
The air cooled M2 MBP doesn't do significantly better than the fan-less MBA; so the results will probably still stand.
As I understand Apple bought out TSMC's state-of-the-art production and competitors are left with less efficient nodes.
The Air throttles after just 5-10 minutes, so anything requiring consistent high-performance will be adversely affected by the passive cooling.
It seems on the Linux front, things are a bit more mixed. Androids optimizations include things like app background usage limits that are harder to integrate in a Linux distro
If you're willing to tolerate a low amount of noise, I find that laptop coolers with very large fans (200mm) work great. The large fan generates a high volume of airflow, but the the low fan speed means that it's almost silent.
The test you want is valid, but for a completely different review category altogether.
Nothing about the laptop quality (fan noise, build materials, speakers, display, track pad, keyboard, etc etc etc) is ever discussed. That's not the comparison here.
An M2 13" Pro would have been a better comparison point though sure.
Silence is golden, and even on the odd occasion where the fan on the 14" M1 Pro starts spinning (e.g. running Cinebench to purposefully max all cores), it's extremely difficult to notice without your ear right up against the laptop.
By comparison, my Windows work laptops (previously an XPS 15, now a ThinkPad T14 Gen2) become plainly audible from 10ft+ away just attending a Teams meeting.
1. The MacBook only has 8GB of ram whereas the Ryzen has 16GB
2. Comparing x86 linux vs arm linux on a MacBook (which is still early days) rather than the most stable and mature OS for both
But are they priced similarly?
> 2. Comparing x86 linux vs arm linux on a MacBook (which is still early days) rather than the most stable and mature OS for both
Hmm .. Doesn't "for both" negate the argument.
Meaningless question when they don't sell the M2 chip separately
> Hmm .. Doesn't "for both" negate the argument
I guess "for each" would be better ? But OPs point still stands, if you put me on a race car you are not breaking any records no matter how good the car is
So it's not a meaningless question at all.
> Meaningless question when they don't sell the M2 chip separately
What does that have to do with the question "Does this X-dollar laptop outperform that X-dollar laptop?"
Does the Ryzen system come with a full aluminum enclosure?
Does it come with a screen with P3 color, 400 nits peak brightness, and HDR support?
What is the battery size on both machines, and how long do each last?
How thin is it? How light it it? How fast does it charge? How much does this affect you daily?
If it was only about CPU performance, I could grab the cheapest Clevo with a Core i9 and it would beat every other manufacturer in the “bang-buck” spec as you are defining it, but it would be an awful experience.
Yes, people might be searching for the best performance, and cost comparison here is fair.
> If it was only about CPU performance, I could grab the cheapest Clevo with a Core i9 and it would beat every other manufacturer in the “bang-buck” spec as you are defining it, but it would be an awful experience.
Evey user has his/her requirements and things he/she is okay to comprmise on.
But they aren't doing that!*
They're specifically comparing performance between two similarly-priced laptops[1]. That's what "benchmark" means.
If this was a review between the two laptops I'd agree with you, but it isn't a review, it's a benchmark suite.
> Does the Ryzen system come with a full aluminum enclosure?
> Does it come with a screen with P3 color, 400 nits peak brightness, and HDR support?
> What is the battery size on both machines, and how long do each last?
> How thin is it? How light it it? How fast does it charge? How much does this affect you daily?
All of these are valid questions, just not for a benchmark. The benchmark is one set of inputs a potential purchaser would take into account, with the other inputs being all those things you mentioned.
[1] I assume that they're similarly priced - I skipped the introduction and went straight to the benchmarks.
The person they replied to was
Lenovo's prices aren't Apple's, this laptop may be sold for similar as Mac.
If you really want one you can get one.
But if you are buying a laptop on the basis of how shiny it is does the CPU performance really matter?
When I bought a car for my wife she picked it out on the basis of how cute it is. She isn't going to run around being upset that it doesn't have 0-60 time of a Subaru WRX. To her the Subaru is ugly.
There's a reason why I still buy ThinkPads - because aluminum is still heavier than magnesium and carbon fiber... and it isn't indestructible.
I have literally two laptops in front of me - ThinkPad made with carbon fiber and MacBook Pro 2021.
Aluminum laptop is heavier, clunkier and less pleasant to work with
AFAIK the 6850U also isn't sold separately.
Linux has supported AMD CPUs for decades and AMD has engineers creating kernel patches to ensure their CPUs work correctly on Linux.
Linux support for Apple chips is in its infancy and what little support it does have has been provided by a ragtag team of volunteers that have reversed engineered the M-series chips.
It's reasonable to assume that the AMD chip might be at a slight advantage on Linux.
Linux has run on ARM since 2002. Apple OSX was first released for ARM in 2020. Apple iOS on ARM wasn't released until 2007.
Though I doubt that any of this is relevant for a CPU only benchmark. I'd bet the effect of compiler support overwhelms any other effects.
So 1800 for the Lenovo vs 1200 for the Mac.
This is a meaningless comparison.
It makes comparing them on prices almost impossible.
Final laptop price isn't that important when this is a CPU comparison, "Apple M2 vs. AMD Ryzen 7 PRO 6850U"
> Hmm .. Doesn't "for both" negate the argument.
What I meant is that they don't use the OS which is most stable and most mature on each platform independently (i.e. some flavour of linux, or even windows, for the Ryzen and macOS for the M2). Either choice will introduce OS differences, but I believe that using the most optimized OS is the better choice as it allows each CPU to show off its best performance.
Hypothetically - a diesel BMW m3 may cost the same as a Camaro with a V8 engine, but what's the point of talking what engines they have... if you are purchasing these items for other reasons.
Based on experience with the M1 Air at least one of those benchmarks Primeseive would be severely throttling.
This whole article seems pretty stupid to me given they really should be benchmarking the M2 MacBook Pro against the Lenovo.
So the question is: are you spec benchmarking, or are you interested in the performance of the workload, because it's the actual work that matters, not how the bits are stored under the keyboard.
(In fact, you could consider the on-die RAM to be a really big Cache and the Flash storage to be REALLY REALLY big Non volatile addressable RAM.)
Those are big ifs. We don't know how much of those 8GBs were used, and how much swapping the OS was forced to do. But either way, it's a silly thing to have different.
You'll get no argument from me on the OS...that's an interesting test decision.
It also makes the GPU architecture very different in ways that makes performance hard to compare.
Phoronix Test Suite isn't a benchmark, it's a marketing tool.
* SOTTR 1080p
* SOTTR 1440p
* SOTTR 4K
* F1 1080p
...
And this wasn't like they had a 1080p geomean and then a 1440p geomean and a 4K geomean... they just had one geomean with a bunch of different resolutions thrown into it, including duplicates of the same game at different resolutions. And sometimes different combinations of resolutions for different games (they might skip 4K for a particular game, etc).
That's pleb-tier benchmarking, pick a random redditor and they know not to make that kind of mistake, it's obviously and facially incorrect.
It just goes to show the power of community goodwill... UserBenchmark's actual sub-scores are reasonably accurate, but because the owner is a massive fucking twat they're persona-non-grata in the internet community (I'm sure I'm going to be regaled with NO THEIR BENCHMARKS ARE TRASH AND HE CHANGES THINGS TO MAKE INTEL but nope, the subscores are accurate, topline "summary" score weights are what he fucks with). Michael Larabel is a very nice guy and frankly doesn't seem to understand the first thing about benchmarking, or score weighting, or mathematics, and constantly puts out trash-tier results with obvious defects, and he's revered in the community, basically a saint.
I know, nobody else is really benchmarking Linux and he's what we've got, if you don't like it then be the change, etcc. But, his results are given incredibly disproportionate weight to the quality there, he's no anandtech. And sadly anandtech is no anandtech anymore.
Games are benchmarked at different resolutions for the same game because that shifts the CPU/GPU burden. It's a great thing to do and many benchmarks do it too, and yes in the same average.
If you don't include a game at those resolutions for no good reason that's one thing, but varying the resolution in the same mean is a good idea.
It also shows you the number of runs. It also shows you the compile options used. All this info is included in every graph.
The complete system setups are described. The test suite is also open source.
It tells you how much the culture of HN has shifted away from technical and engineering types. It's also telling that they think 16gb of ram changes the outcome of very trivial tests that don't use 8gb anyway.
A typical programmer knows what phoronix is and does and shouldn't be surprised by how it performs tests since it has done so the same way for a decade...but then I suppose most people on this site are not technical people anymore.
Specifying that knowledge of a benchmarking site is required for those having a technical background is just a weird hill to die on though.
This isn't benchmarking the capabilities of the M2 chip at all when we know it will be throttling in the MacBook Air.
I love benchmarks and graphs as the next guy, but these one just don't feel right.
Linux on Macbook, 16GB vs 8GM ram. Amusing, yes, but not very informative.
These benchmarks tell you what performance you get with this array of programs, on linux, with these machines. You want to know something about the inherent performance capabilties of each cpu, which is very hard to figure out, since we will never know when/if any of these programs has had a totally optimal solution for each piece of hardware.
Usually the best you can do is just measure actual programs people use.
I found the data compelling--M2 silicon under Linux is generally competitive against contemporary strong x86 laptops, but if you are sensitive about the performance of a particular workload, choose your device carefully.
Fun to think that Apple almost has a monopoly on RISC technical workstations…
In my experience Ryzen support on Linux is far from optimal. Have experienced tons of issues on zen+ and zen 2.
And don't forget that the x64 code is slowed down by tons of security mitigations. I don't think most of these are available on M2 yet.
What kinds of issues have you seen?
I've been running a home server with a Ryzen 7 PRO 4750G and so far it's been stellar.
> slowed down by tons of security mitigations. I don't think most of these are available on M2 yet.
Are they needed at all? I thought the security mitigations were mostly for x86-specific architectural issues. Would you mind to elaborate?
Now the existing discovered ones may not, but I'm sure in time there will be ones for Apple Silicon too. Just like how people for the longest time thought AMD was safer than Intel in this regard, or that ARM wasn't vulnerable.
Regarding the other point: run lscpu and compare enabled mitigations on Zen3 and M2. We still need a proper analysis to figure out which ones must be enabled on M2.
Lammps molecular dynamics is by Sandia national labs, they probably have a good ARM implementation. LeelaChessZero is also a SIMD-implementation IIRC. Both are SIMD-accelerated, but LeelaChessZero is faster on M2, but LAMMPS is faster on AMD.
I don't get it at all. Its really hard to see the pattern. Furthermore, its hard for me to imagine that LAMMPS would be much worse on one system over another, given the authors.
---------
Then comes the "in-between" benchmarks. DaCappo is slower on low-power settings for M2, but high-power setting M2 faster than any setting. Very strange behavior, I can't imagine why this would happen.
ZSTD compression is faster on AMD, but decompression is faster on M2. Same codebase, same authors, but different results over two different runs.
It's certainly what Cloudflare found when they were evaluating early ARM server chips.
>the first benchmark would be the popular zlib library. At Cloudflare we use an improved version of the library, optimized for 64-bit Intel processors, and although it is written mostly in C, it does use some Intel specific intrinsics. Comparing this optimized version to the generic zlib library wouldn’t be fair. Not to worry, with little effort I adapted the library to work very well on the ARMv8 architecture, with the use of NEON and CRC32 intrinsics. In the process it is twice as fast as the generic library for some files.
https://blog.cloudflare.com/arm-takes-wing/
SIMD code has to be hand written for both instruction sets before you are comparing Apples to Apples, as it were.
Look at the benchmarks in the post. Some are consumer programs, but others are supercomputer programs with an enormous amount of optimization effort put into them for a variety of platforms.
For instance, in the example above, Cloudflare doubled the speed of the code by taking advantage of ARM specific instructions in the same way they had previously optimized their code for x86 specific instructions.
Of course, using the availible instructions isn't the same thing as putting in a heavy investment of time to make the code as efficient as possible.
As an example, look at x86 AV1 video encoders. The early ones were incredibly slow, but through many iterations of hand written SIMD code, recent versions have been getting much faster on the same hardware.
ARM / Apple M2 here is just 128-bit vectors. AMD / Intel AVX is 256-bit vectors, which is harder to optimize for (!!) due to the increased parallelism.
NEON itself is kinda crappy, missing a few good data-movement instructions (pshufb doesn't exist in ARM world), but IIRC, there are hard-coded swizzles in NEON that reach high levels of performance. So in this case, its simply easier to write pshufb style code in Intel/AMD systems.
Then again, I don't expect that a BLAS library would use pshufb too much. So you'd probably just have a simple dot-product like vector going up-and-down RAM to maximize your matrix-multiplication speeds.
----------
That's what I mean. LAMMPS isn't "easy" but it should fundamentally be a matrix multiplication (which is highly studied, and well optimized on all platforms). Indeed, the best performing BLAS libraries these days are on NVidia, not Intel or ARM for that matter. (Though Intel's AVX512 matrix multiplications are probably next best, they don't apply to this Apple vs AMD comparison).
You can't just assume a problem exists in general. There's some benchmarks in here that are sufficiently well optimized in ARM yet still come out better for the AMD chips. And vice versa for that matter (I'd expect LeelaZero to favor AMD, so I was surprised to see it better on the Apple M2).
---------
Assuming a Russell's Teapot just because there was a teapot from an unrelated benchmark years ago is kind of a bad form of argument. SIMD-compute (AVX, NEON, SVE, etc. etc.) has become more popular today, and there are more NEON_optimized libraries today than even just 5 years ago. And there are plenty of applications in this Phoronix benchmark where we'd reasonably expect good ARM-NEON optimizations.
I'm reminded of the Handbrake people back in 2018 telling users that the current open source implementations of AV1 encoder ran 6,000 times slower than h.264 encode, and that they wouldn't be adding support for AV1 encode anytime soon, as the code base needed time to be optimized.
See here:
https://github.com/HandBrake/HandBrake/issues/457
Just because you run on a particular instruction set doesn't mean you're using that instruction set in an optimal manner.
But here there's quite a few >2x wins and not even consistently within a given program. Like GNU radio can't make up its mind which one will utterly dominate.
I don’t think 2x ram matters in many (any?) of these, as for that to impact things you really do have to be using all the ram, and once you started doing that I would expect to see noticeable cratering in perf.
2x core count is more problematic, esp. for things that do max out threads, but many of these benchmarks clearly didn’t (or the M2 is insanely fast in specific tests :) ). Many of those benchmarks that do use thread count == core count allow you to cap the thread count independently which I would hope was done if possible.
Power envelope I just don’t really care about, if thermals force the laptop to throttle that doesn’t mean the performance numbers don’t match reality. I did go into this knowing it’s a desktop va laptop benchmark and know there will be trade offs involved.
I think it’s also worth doing a performance per dollar comparison here as well, though I have no idea what the result would be in this case.
So the hardware stuff out of the way, a few of the benchmarks showed such a massive performance delta (in both directions) that I wonder if we’re seeing code/codegen differences.
The reality is that the M2 is an arm system, and most projects have only ever really had x86 to worry about for performance, so they have “if x86 do vector stuff; else do it old skool one at a time”, which can have massive perf impact.
In the reverse I’ve seen code that goes arm==float32 x86==float64, which has obvious perf impact.
Anther huge killer is anything that uses long double. For everything other than x86 long double basically means float32 or float64. On x86 (everywhere I think except win64?) long double is float80, which is much much slower than the alternatives for far to many reasons to list. So that seems like it could easily footgun code that’s being benchmarked as well.
All in all I thought this was a good article and it was an interesting read.
Also comparing both on linux when one is having active work done to port linux to it also makes the entire comparison dubious at best, just like most of phoronix's articles.
Perhaps we could use these numbers to measure progress on the m2+ linux port and m2+ linux performance?
P cores: 4, E cores: 8, total cores: 12, total threads: 16.
>Just tried compiling the Asahi Linux distro kernel (pretty beefy config) on the M1 Ultra Mac Studio.
2 minutes, 1 second.
https://www.lenovo.com/us/en/p/laptops/thinkpad/thinkpadx/th...
https://www.apple.com/shop/buy-mac/macbook-air/midnight-appl...
Am I missing something?
This is also true for other enterprise brands such as HP and Dell.
I guess they do that because they target mostly businesses and it gives them more flexibility when negotiating bulk deals.
I wonder what's the appeal for bumping up the prices but routinely offering discounts. I guess they might sell some fully priced computers.
Consumers mostly aren't buying that one (except maybe the tech audience), and businesses aren't paying list price.
But given the way this testing was done, there's little reason to step up from the $1,499 Air, either, though testing the $1,699 Air with 16GB would've alleviated any potential concerns about RAM affecting benchmark scores.
This is especially true for most people, because most people will not be doing any one of those workloads _most_ of the time. Most of the time of computer use is doing many different things (at the human level and the software level), so the final compute comparison is basically comparing the difference of a small percentage of overall human time.
So the choice between M2 and Ryzen is really about everything else - the use case, the hardware styling, the OS features, etc.
It's good to know this benchmark info, though, because it means we can cross that concern off mentally.
https://github.com/guitorri/ngspice/blob/master/INSTALL
"--disable-debug This option will remove the '-g' option passed to the compiler and add -O2 optimisation (instead of default O0). This speeds up simulating significantly, and is recommended for normal use."
I'd love a more direct and comparative benchmark set though e.g. Apple M2 on macOS vs. Ryzen Pro 6850 on Linux, and with at least identical RAM.
To me Apple M1 (and maybe M2, have not checked it out yet) remains an absolute leader in performance per watt. Combine the amazing displays and it's almost not a contest. Of course, like every programmer I started getting irritated by macOS because a lot of tinkering and experimentation is simply not possible there.
I really hope for at least comparable Linux competitor. Even being behind the M1/M2 with 30% for the same power envelope would be a huge win.
> "the myth that x86 is always going to be better"
> "a lot of this is to try to support it through proof in benchmarks"
There is no myth that x86 is always going to be better. Apple created a great architecture, but we can't all migrate to Macs, and sometimes we can't even afford to migrate to ARM. Not because of ideology, but because of legacy systems.
So these benchmarks are not to support any kind of propaganda, just trying out new chips to see if we can finally get the same generational leap on the PC as well.
Who cares about what Intel/AMD wants. Phoronix isn't the puppet of any of them, just another enthusiast user trying to inform.
We are very close to the Apple M2 being the best Linux laptop right ?
I've got the impression that HN is using _lots of_ varying platforms, it's not like Apple is vastly prefered (or looked down to) around here.
What SUCKS is Windows 11. This bitch crashes more than any other Windows I have used in history dating back to 3.11
Jeasus, this OS sucks.
The AMD v Intel BS means nothing to me. The guts are good, the body is strong, but the soul is too soft.
Which made it seem like the manufacturer hadn't tested the laptop at all.
Apple laptops have problems but not fundamental ones like that.
Really surprised that anyone would consider this a fair comparison. Thermal management is a huge factor to consider with these tests given safety limiters reduce CPU performance.