M2 MacBook Air scores higher on Windows 11 GeekBench than pricier Dell laptop
cultofmac.com
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I have my XPS 13 browsing HN next to my M1 air. That's all the XPS is doing, firefox browsing HN. My M2 has multiple docker containers, a collection of office apps open, browsers, vs code... and so on.
My XPS battery will barely last until 1pm if it isn't plugged in, and the fan kicks on for no apparent reason... It will last a little longer if I manually set it to "best battery life" but even that can be surprisingly ineffective for no apparent reason sometimes.
My M2 Air will last nearly two full working days (I haven't pushed it that far but so far it appears it would make it), the battery life is crazy. I go into the office and I don't even think about plugging it in, I know it will do fine.
I don't know what it is about macOS and using their M chips but the efficiency is amazing to me.
I even had a docker container freak out on my Air recently. It pegged a CPU core to 100% for a good 45 minutes. Temp skyrocketed. But I was on another virtual desktop and I didn't notice a thing. The OS ran smooth, vscode, node and everything else was running smooth. It wasn't until I looked at the status bar that I saw the CPU and temp had skyrocketed. I found the container responsible, killed it, and temp dropped quickly. Even under non ideal situations the Air performed well.
With my XPS the moment I put it down I think about where I can plug it in. If I pick up my XPS to quick order some Tacos and it wasn't plugged in from the start I feel like i"m in a race to get the order in "Come on, hold on, I need tacos!!!"
With my Air I don't even think about plugging it in, that's a completely new experience for a laptop for me.
I don't really understand the benchmarks and such that I've seen, but the every day user experience has been like night and day.
I recently installed Fedora 36 on my Tiger Lake (i5-1130G7) ThinkPad X1 Nano, and while the machine has never had particularly good battery life, it's more "calm" under Linux on average. Even while setting things up with various things running its fan didn't kick on and it didn't get warm like it typically would under both the Windows 10 installation it shipped with, as well the current upgraded Windows 11 install.
Additionally, while I haven't yet actually tested it, GNOME under Linux estimates that it'd get somewhere in the ballpark of 8-8.5 hours out of a full charge when running in "battery saver" mode, which is a good hour or two longer than Windows' estimate in its low power mode.
Of course the M-series devices I've used destroy the ThinkPad in terms of battery life, regardless of the OS it's booted into though.
Am I the only one not bothering with Windows' estimates at all? It will happily tell me I have two hours remaining and shut down after 40 minutes, without me touching the PC at all. I had this or similar experience with every windows laptop I ever used.
As for hours of use in marketing material I wonder what they'll claim when they actually get close to their current estimates? Just lie about it more? How will we know if they're getting close to the truth?
It's gotten to the point that I've had to configure it to hibernate at 98%.
This is not very nice on the laptop vendor's part. This laptop is less than 2 years old.
In addition to each process being given a priority, a number that can be changed using the command tool renice, some years ago Apple introduced another setting, the QoS. This is set for each process, and can be one of four discrete values from 9 (the lowest, for background tasks) to 33 (the highest, for tasks involving user interaction).
https://eclecticlight.co/2022/01/07/how-macos-controls-perfo...
I reckon this is more of a heterogeneous architecture thing than a MacOS/Apple one. When you run a processor-intensive task, Grand Central Dispatch will assign it a relative priority and then, on new M1 chips, delegate the process to a core cluster. While one heavy program runs, another can operate alongside it on the efficiency cores or even another P-core cluster.
I've noticed this behavior as well on Alder Lake. There are several times I've booted up Bitwig with something like Elden Ring running in the background, and had no idea it was open while I worked on music.
All-for-all though, this next generation of CPUs is going to be awesome. Everyone is finally doing their own thing, and actually getting somewhere:
- Intel is working on process enhancement and bumping nodes to make fast, heterogeneous x86 CPUs
- Apple is focusing on density above all else, optimizing for a more efficient, streamlined heterogeneous ARM package
- AMD is doing things "the old way", with a tick-tock schedule for process bumps and IPC optimizations to their homogeneous x86 CPU
- Bonus: there's also a bunch of Chinese manufacturers fighting for dominance over the homogeneous ARM CPU market (mostly for use in servers).
Please tell me more or tell me where i can learn more.
So longer than 4, but for just browsing IMO it should last much longer.
But doing that they haven't caused any issues. Granted Teams, while on a video conference, will eat battery, but it handles a few meetings a day just fine overall.
I should install those apps one day ...
I setup a VM for work stuff that includes a bunch of admin policies and work-installed junk a few weeks ago to work while traveling. It didn't even break a sweat and Teams felt as responsive as my recent i7 desktop. At the same time I was able to run all my usual dev stuff on the Mac. It felt like it would handle classic Visual Studio as well, but I didn't want to bother with the install.
.NET development and in particular stepping through debugging is particularly slow, though I guess we should be happy it works at all.
TBF, I think the M1 CPUs crossed the magic barrier already
Such a shame for Intel, AMD and Qualcomm.
> Windows running in VM on M2 is faster than native Windows on x86.
Which x86? 12th gen Intel? 11th gen Intel? Ryzen 6000? These are all wildly different processors. This comment is absurd. It's also "Windows ARM version running in a VM on M2", not x86 windows which is the only thing you'd care about running in VM on MacOS if you were actually going to do this for some reason.
But also wouldn't be possible without good work from Parallels.
Background at: https://blogs.vmware.com/teamfusion/2022/07/just-released-vm...
(Disclaimer: I work at VMware - but not on Fusion)
VMWare Fusion is an afterthought of a multi-billion dollar company.
Not true these days. "In December 2018, Parallels became part of the Corel Corporation and joins an impressive collection of industry-leading brands, including CorelDRAW®, WinZip® and MindManager®. Parallels has offices in North America, Europe, Australia and Asia."
If the article is true (and that's a big if, given Max Tech's history of tech reporting), instead of blaming the above companies I'd just congratulate Apple and thank them for putting the bar higher. AMD recent processors are still great on the desktop, and an absolute blast on the server, with extremely attractive value for money ratio.
Yes they are truly great but point to consider is they are just competing against Intel. Don't get wrong I love what AMD has done recently with Ryzen but we need ARM based servers which has perf per watt competing with M1/M2
We have them? Graviton instances are priced pretty competitively compared to similar x86 EC2 instances. A lot of people don't use Graviton though (myself included) for a number of reasons. A lot of software hasn't been ported over to aarch64 yet, and even when it is it can lack the optimization that x86 enjoys (especially with programs leveraging AVX et. al). Furthermore, the CPUs that Amazon use seem to be bottlenecked by low IO bandwidth, which makes for some janky benchmarks when comparing simple database operations.
I think we'll eventually see a return to RISC architectures, but ARM's value proposition hasn't made a lot of sense on the server. It's still encumbered with proprietary licenses that make it extremely hard for CPU manufacturers to compete in the server market. It still hasn't figured out all of it's hardware-acceleration quirks, and you don't get any Rosetta 2 fairy dust on Linux (not that you'd want to use it in prod anyways). All in all, x86 is still the set-and-forget king, and probably more stable than ARM alternatives. I'm hopeful that RISC-V will finally put x86 in it's grave, but that's going to be a couple years out...
In my own workloads. Which are not burst, but first sustained CPU, and then sustained I/O, at about 5MB/s.
So, it is cheaper for Amazon, as they use half the power, but not cheaper for end users.
Intel has no real excuse since they use their own fabs and spun their wheels on 14nm for half a decade.
I was shopping for a laptop a month ago and considering the M2 MacBook. The CPU performance is definitely impressive, but I ended up getting a Razer Blade 14 because it absolutely decimates the MacBook in GPU performance and gaming related stuff, unless you go top of the line MacBook Pro which would have been about $1200 more and couldn't run most games. If you don't need a great GPU I would definitely go with a MacBook, but if you need one you're just not going to beat an RTX 3080 and an AMD Ryzen.
But I absolutely work on the go, and need the battery life I get from the Mac so I’m not constantly looking for a place to charge.
You can also put a much faster CPU and GPU in a workstation than a laptop, if you have enough headroom for 105W TDP CPU and 350W TDP GPU.
I'm not sure I'd call it niche. No I'm not playing counterstrike in a coffee shop, but it can be fun to bring it over to a friends house. I haven't bought a desktop since 2014, I like having the freedom to work from anywhere and not have to move files between computers all the time. When I have it at home I have it hooked into 3 monitors and a full size keyboard, and it runs pretty quiet, so it's not really any different from having a desktop in that regard.
YMMV though. Most of what I do with a computer even besides games needs a very powerful GPU. If you're working with docker and webdev I'd just get a macbook. My only point is that apple doesn't have a pure monopoly on performance, as impressive as their new silicon is there's some things it's still not so good at.
For mobile computing + gaming I replaced my discreet gpu Macbook Pro with an M2 Air + SteamDeck and I'm enjoying everything a lot more.
I believe - it will OBLITERATE M2.
Also doesn't really obliterate the M2:
https://browser.geekbench.com/macs/macbook-air-2022
Seems like multi-core scores are all over the map (probably depending on the cooling of the laptop), but not really impressive when comparing to a passively cooled CPU. Single-core scores are meh compared to the M2.
Here is my result:
https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/16820778
Given that I didn't stop anything and was playing Dota 2 while running it ...
Still, I believe at some point once newer iterations of X86-64 drop support for legacy instructions (they still have to support code running on 8080/8086 through 486) - we will have smaller, more efficient X86-64 chips.
Actually, it is darn impressive that the latest Intel/AMD chips keep up with the brand new M1/M2 chips that have zero legacy instructions and the Intel/AMD chips carry 50 years of legacy :)
Here are the results on Performance Power Plan - https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/16821908
Summarized results - https://i.imgur.com/X5vKtFn.png
Overall, with the new results - AMD Ryzen 9 5900HX is 18% slower in Single Core, 4% faster in Multi Core.
Not that bad ...
4% is probably close to noise level, so essentially you are a couple of percentage points faster on multicore with TWICE the total power envelope. Think about that.
And almost 1/5th slower in single core.
Also, you went from "It will OBLITERATE M2" to moving the goal post "not that bad" pretty quickly. I love it.
But still, pointless to me - I don't care about power efficiency, battery life or any synthetic benchmarks.
I have two concerns with a laptop:
1. Can it run the latest Visual Studio at blazing fast speed?
2. Can it run Dota 2 on Full HD @ >144 fps?
So far ... M2 doesn't fulfill fully neither point 1 nor point 2 :)
4% faster for 2.5x more power isn't a win. The fact that 95% of users care more about that 18% single-threaded performance makes this even worse.
Don't forget we are comparing last-gen AMD vs current gen M2.
M2 on Mac makes 1884/8717, but on Paralles -> 1681/7260.
So, the penalty is 11% on single, 17% on multi because of running on Windows via Paralles.
APPLE M1 average Single Core is 1706, average multi is 7421 on MAC.
If we apply the above penalty becomes -> 1706/7421 -> 1522/6180.
AMD 5900HX average Single Core is 1413, average multi is 7656.
So, AMD - 1413/7656 | Apple M1 - 1522/6180 -> Amd is 8% slower in single, 19% faster in multi.
The TDP according to AMD's website is "45+W" which they clarify to be a cTDP up to 54w TDP.
Don't get too excited about it. The old compatibility is going to be tiny in the die space compared to even basic Intel extensions. And it's not just the old code - new code may well contain a "mov al..." so you can't just drop it. All of those instructions will stay with us for decades.
(Apparently I’m wrong, leaving my original gaffe in place.)
Once you try M1/M2 Macs it's very hard to go back to pretty much any hardware.
I agree that M1/M2 Macs are good, but I implore everyone to not get sucked into and stuck into the Apple ecosystem. Nothing good can come out of tech dominance.
So much this. Every time I hear something good about the M1/M2 it's interesting but it's like "aah, such a shame I can never use it without loosing my sanity due to all of the strings it has attached".
Context: There are some Linux users who want to use the hardware (so they can enjoy the M1/2 whatever) so there are efforts to get it running as a Linux machine (Asahi Linux), which would certainly keep me far more sane - but I still abhor giving money to Apple for the hardware (even 2nd hand which supports resale value and thus retail value)... I also don't trust that they wont simply pull the rug on such efforts in future by doing some kind of over the wire firmware update to brick those machines. Why do business with people who don't like you, it's just going to be a constant fight.
Every time an article comes up reminding me of how great the M1/M2 laptops are, I think about maybe getting a used one in a few years to run Debian on, but the soldered on SSD worries me (especially since early Apple software issues burned through erase cycles).
The dance between hardware, software, and devices, and its consistency, is a measurable good. To me, this is the "magic sauce" of Apple that makes them successful.
But, to agree with your point, my general rule is: Apple hardware, with third party services (besides iCloud). And, a PC or console for gaming. :)
Those processors will be able to run Windows and linux. More efficiency for non apple ecosystem. I consider that win for everyone
Actually, I'm not sure why Apple would be the "supporting tech dominance" choice here as opposed to Intel.
The fact that M1/M2 can run something is almost irrelevant. It can because Apple allows you to run it and can stop that at any moment. It wouldn't be the first time they would decide something like that out of the blue.
The lead Asahi Linux developer has addressed this point.
>Okay, it's been over a year, and it's time to end the nonsense speculation.
I have heard from several Apple employees that:
Apple explicitly engineered 3rd party OS support in, and it is a hard policy requirement that it continue to work.
Yes, I shouldn't expect Raspberry to run non-ARM software... but why exactly shouldn't I? Where are the trillion-upon-trillion-dollar players like Google, Samsung and others with their Rosetta-like translation layers? And Qualcomm with competitive CPUs?
For what its worth, there are some rosetta like options on RPi - you can run x86 containers in QEMU, for example. Its just again you've bought a 35 dollar computer - its not going to be fast enough to be performant for most tasks when translating (in real time!) software written for a completely different CPU architecture.
> https://gist.github.com/Sitin/bfa5e770b80ab4b8740c88e648666c...
Linux is being developed mostly by trillion-dollar corporations. Intel. Google. Samsung. etc.
ARM chips are designed and produced by Samsung, Qualcomm etc.
You'd think they would:
- come up with a competitive chip, and
- Rosetta-like software
that even "$35 dollar hobbyist computer" would be able to do this with, quote "powerful 64-bit CPU".
Alas.
And no, I'm not buying the whole "you shouldn't expect". Because, as it turns out, I can't expect this from any computer, be it hobbyist, educational, family, gamer, professional, or whatever adjectives you can put in front of it. Except Apple.
If you want Broadcom to release a CPU that's on par with the M1, half of your Pi's circuit board will be just the CPU die's BGA pins.
Intel's (and others') price gouging and market segmentation does not in any way imply that it's possible to manufacture an i7/i9/R7/R9/M1 at $20 a piece.
--- start quote ---
Because, as it turns out, I can't expect this from any computer, be it hobbyist, educational, family, gamer, professional, or whatever adjectives you can put in front of it. Except Apple.
--- end quote ---
The other side of the puzzle is software. I'm pretty sure there is a lot of headroom in the rpi hardware, if only someone re-write and re-optimize the os and software for it.
That's part of the magic of Mac - they got to hire as many people to optimize the os as they did to build the chip / computer itself.
Surprisingly performant and very impressive.
It's great at emulating arcades! that's totally non-arm software.
The major use-case I can think of for building a rosetta-like x86 translation layer for the Pi is to run Windows software. All the relevant Linux software can, or has been, ported to ARM. Do you think the average user of Windows software is going to be happy with the performance of an x86 emulator running on a $35 ARM computer with barely enough memory to run a few Chrome tabs?
Those guys have absolutely no clue what they're talking about and just make bullshit click bait.
AMD's current offerings are pretty competitive with Apple. Unfortunately, they are hard to find. Yes, the real good stuff is almost unobtainium
Nothing new here, this is just better 5nm process advantage (which M2 undoubtedly has).
I really wish thermal throttling was the first major point of discussion for ALL laptop CPU's. One of my work laptops never reached full cpu speeds in the real world because it would get thermally throttled!
Exactly. Intel claims performance leadership based on their P series chips, which are always going to be throttled in a slim and light laptop.
For instance, Lenovo's thin and light ThinkPad X1 Yoga has two fans but still throttles:
>Unfortunately, the laptop got uncomfortably hot in its Best performance mode during testing, even with light workloads.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/07/review-lenovos-think...
Or the Dell XPS 13 Plus:
>the XPS 13 Plus’ fan was really struggling here because, boy oh boy, did this thing get hot.
After a few hours of regular use (which, in my case, is a dozen or so Chrome tabs with Slack running over top), this laptop was boiling. I was getting uncomfortable keeping my hands on the palm rests and typing on the keyboard. Putting it on my lap was off the table.
https://www.theverge.com/23284276/dell-xps-13-plus-intel-202...
I'd do something that caused high load, and it would be briefly fast then suddenly everything would get sluggish. I naively thought this was normal ("under load") until some time I was doing the same workload on a similar-spec desktop CPU and it didn't happen. In trying to discovery why is when I first learned about thermal throttling.
With Apple Silicon MBP I’m not sure what level of load should be to cause throttling with full-speed fans.
Also remember this is running in a VM (guaranteed overhead) and Windows for ARM (this is the red head step child of Microsoft). Even if they closed the gap, this is still impressive.
For example, let's check out the M1 Mini review that Anandtech did, specifically these two pages:
https://www.anandtech.com/show/16252/mac-mini-apple-m1-teste... https://www.anandtech.com/show/16252/mac-mini-apple-m1-teste...
According to Geekbench, the M1 handily beats the 5950X in single-threaded work. However, according to Cinebench 1T and spec2017, the 5950X is faster at single-threaded. Who is "correct"?
The answer is a much more simple "look at the benchmark results that matter for your workloads." A good review will cover benchmarks of a variety of workloads as a result so you can figure out which matters to you. Which is never geekbench, since nobodies workload is ever geekbench. So a good review will tend to not include geekbench rather than include it, unless they just don't have better ways to compare whatever they're testing.
These opinions are my own, not of AMD.
> Designed from the ground-up for cross-platform comparisons, Geekbench 5 allows you to compare system performance across devices, operating systems, and processor architectures. Geekbench 5 supports Android, iOS, macOS, Windows, and Linux.
But it seems like there are a lot of other options.
https://www.phoronix.com/review/macos12-windows-linux
PC hardware sites are probably less concerned with "cross-platform" benchmarks. As long as the system hardware and operating system are the same, varying only the component you're testing, you can test with any benchmark that runs on the system.
https://nanoreview.net/en/cpu-compare/intel-core-i7-1280p-vs...
That has the M2 winning single core but losing multicore. I didn't watch the video because 8 minutes is ridiculous so I don't know what they're doing. But it's probably not apples to apples.
Adjustable playback speed is your friend
(and even that page had confusing wording that made me think the opposite for a while).
Looking at unboxing videos of Apple laptops gives me goosebumps, seeing all the reflections in the screen:
https://youtu.be/eSlAJMsM6CM?t=321
The Dell XPS to which it is compared here is available as a matte version and is nicely suitable to work outside.
But you can't convert a matte screen to glossy.
Also, matte doesn't necessarily translate to more legible outdoors either. Matte removes reflections by reducing contrast which has its own drawbacks.
It's an interesting issue, because I have the same feelings about the recent launch of the SteamDeck. The highest priced model has an etched mat screen and the lower models have a reflective one. I'd say that it's far more noticeable in the steamdeck than it is on my macbook screen, even though they look very similar.
My guess is the adaptive brightness and sensors are very well tuned.
Still not as nice as e.g. an e-ink display would be.
I don't think the M2 Air has this option, so I would say: not very usable outside.
My m1 is unusable at 80% of the comfortable angles, and not at all at the optimal one.
Unusable at 80% of the comfortable angles? Come on now.
Which Lenovo is it?
I’ve been wondering if Apple’s latest software updates are optimized for the new machines at the expense of the old ones?
Not sure how Apple could optimize for both architectures simultaneously, and if they faced a tradeoff, I’m pretty sure what they’d do…
Microsoft will certainly continue to put effort into developing the ARM version of Windows, and try to follow Apple's path in getting a version of Rosetta to run the legacy Windows applications.
I'm certain that Dell already has ARM-based laptops and servers in development. Until the Windows version of Rosetta works as well as Apple's, there will likely continue to be a demand for x86 machines, but pretty much every PC vendor can see the transition coming. I'm hoping Framework comes out with something soon.
Not sure that this does much for Google. Their datacenters already run custom CPUs, and web applications should be agnostic to the CPU powering the web browser. Android phones are already running ARM.
Let's assume that Apple is 2 years ahead now, and that their rate of innovation is 20% higher than any competitor. The answer is therefore that the competitors will never catch up. This is why I am long APPL.
Almost all of this is lost on MacOS. It's odd. Word and Excel are almost 1:1, but Outlook is a dumpster fire.
2. Is this only Windows/graphics specific, or Parallels on M2 can also run Ubuntu x86 OS (not Asahi Linux) and code faster than the latest x86 laptops?
https://kb.parallels.com/125343
You can install the Windows ARM insider builds and run x86_64 applications through the emulation in Windows.
Parallels on Apple Silicon cannot run x86 OS's.
If you want to run x86, you can use qemu which works fine.
It works for sure. It has a very noticeable performance impact though.
> If you want to run x86, you can use qemu which works fine.
Are there any benchmarks for x86 Ubuntu under QEMU on M1/M2? Will it be usable?
- I dislike macOS (when I had Intel MBA in the past it was collecting dust until I installed Ubuntu on it).
- I don't want to have 2 sets of instructions how to do something (i.e. once on macOS on AppleSilicon and once on Ubuntu x86)
- I want my local dev env to be as similar as possible to the deployment env.
Not sure how Ubuntu for ARM with x86 JIT for user code is the answer, judging by your reply it might be slow also.
In the server side of things there's Neoverse, graviton, etc.. which might have "trickle-down" effects but since it's primarily focused on just having more cores rather than faster cores that seems unlikely. And that also hasn't "proven to be better than x86" either, Epyc is a beast and AMD doesn't seem to be slowing down or hitting any limits in scaling up.
Certain ARM implementations (M1, M2) have proven better than certain implementations of x86 (basically all of them). The ARM implementations in question are not available for general purchase. It's only worth the effort to switch if a competitive processor becomes available. It doesn't look like the MS teamup with qualcomm that resulted in the sq1/sq2 procs are that.
In the server space, that's different given that graviton/cavium have proven competitive.
1. They have been locked into using chips from Qualcomm, which are just slower than Apple's ARM designs. 2. Qualcomm has not implemented the hardware necessary to speed up the x86 translation. The basic problem with running x86 applications on ARM is handling differences in the memory model (x86 uses a strong memory model, ARM uses a weak one). This is slow to handle in software, but IIUC Apple customized their hardware to speed up that operation, which puts them in a much better place for emulating x86.
Certainly the floor for the complexity and size of an ARM processor is lower than for x86 - the ISA is smaller, easier to decode, and suffers from fewer silly legacy baggage items.
However, the reality is that all modern out-of-order microarchitectures are fiendishly complex and that at the "top of the game," implementation details at every level of implementation matter more than the fundamental ISA at play. With x86 there's a certain die size and complexity "tax" in terms of instruction decoding and support that majorly affects small designs. For example, an x86 microcontroller would be a bad idea compared to an ARM one, full stop. But, once you've paid that top-line x86 tax and you're building a huge out-of-order microarchitecture, the differences are minimal and how well you build the rest of the CPU's machinery matters much more than the ISA you started with.
One difference is having constant instruction length, which allows highly parallel decoding and a wider machine in general. This is part of what makes Apple's CPUs faster and cannot be replicated by x86-64, ARM32 or RISC-V with compressed instructions.
It isn't. ARM's fixed-length instructions helped Apple achieve a wider front-end than contemporary x86 CPUs which helped, but that's about the end of the ISA differences.
Which is why all the other ARM CPUs are slower than x86 CPUs. ARM doesn't really provide an advantage. Apple's stonking huge cash and R&D budget along with Intel struggling right as TSMC is firing on all cylinders is what gives M1/M2 an advantage.
1. Whenever you do an x86 vs ARM comparison, there's a number of variables that need to be considered, the node size of the CPU, the power envelope, number of cores, cooling, etc... that make it very difficult to do 1 to 1 comparisons.
2. The main issue x86 wise is that every x86 CPU needs support instructions going back to the 1980s for backwards compatibility, which "wastes" a lot of silicon on functions which are rarely used but need to be in there.
3. Apple has the ability to have their products focus on a few specific devices and just one operating system. This helps design CPUs that they know 100% what they need to handle. You couldn't say that a Qualcomm Snapdragon, just because it's ARM, is better than x86.
All that being said, I'm very much someone who prefers x86 hardware and Windows, but the M1/M2 and Rosetta are very impressive pieces of hardware/software that hopefully kick Microsoft/Linux/Intel/AMD to innovate.
Curious, is this due to something about x86 design (eg: technical benefits over ARM), or are you just referring to the "PC" hardware ecosystem in general (as opposed to Apple/macOS)?
RISC has had its moments. Way back, it was better than CISC because the simpler instructions allowed a higher clock rate. Then CISC CPUs turned into RISC CPUs with a CISC-to-RISC translation on the front end. With that in place, there was a whole stretch of time where the only real advantage that RISC had over CISC was that RISC didn't have to have a lump of silicon that translates CISC into RISC instructions.
However, now there's enough space on the die for a CPU to have lots of parallel execution units, and the part of it that became really difficult to scale was the CISC-to-RISC translation unit, because each CISC instruction had an unpredictable length, making working out which instructions you can translate tricky and silicon-consuming.
And so RISC has a significant advantage once more, and that is the ability to vastly-simplify the part of the CPU that feeds instructions into the execution pool, compared to a CISC CPU, because the instructions are fixed-length. This allows this part to translate more instructions per clock cycle than a typical CISC CPU can, and this is what gives the improved performance.
> CISC-to-RISC translation on the front end
I would naively assume that this would be an advantage, since you could easily change the hardware used for any CISC instruction, finding better ways to make it faster. The "work unit" is more abstract, so you could throw the whole problem at dedicated silicon. Or, you could remove dedicated silicon, and just have the CIST spit out a list of RISC instructions.
It seems that, for RISC, you could never throw a more abstract "work unit" at dedicated silicon, without buffering instructions, to see if the intent matches the accelerators. Chip specific compilers would almost be required, to handle the abstraction.
In comparison, a RISC instruction decoder knows that each instruction is the same length, so each instruction can be decoded without depending on the ones before it. This simplifies the decoder so much that it makes it possible to decode four instructions per clock cycle without investing in too much silicon to do it, and while keeping a high clock speed.
It is more performant because the silicon is made by a company that didn't botch their last process node.
They already have that.