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Comment by mort96 | Hacker News Reader

It's not a game changer because it will boost opportunistically like every other CPU? What?

We already had a game changer, Apple Silicon. AMD chips are a bit better than Intel's on mobile but not by much. Mobile Zen4 and RDNA3 SoC would not be a game changer. We already know how they perform on desktop and how much power they use per performance.

I was wondering how far I'd have to scroll before someone trotted out the Apple horse.

Farther than I thought, it turns out.

You know, for all the stuff about Apple silicon being a game changer it doesn't really seem like the game has changed that much...

Yeah, it hasn't. x86 is still crap.

Let me know when Apple decides to sell their chips to 3rd party manufacturers, when they end up in a handheld gaming device, and when most games run natively on ARM with competitive performance.

Apple silicon was only a game changer for productivity tasks, and only for people willing to jump into the Apple ecosystem. In all other cases, especially for gaming, an APU with the performance of Zen4/RDNA3 at the announced TDP doesn't exist yet. So, yes, it's a game changer.

> when most games run natively on ARM with competitive performance.

They just need to run natively on ARM to get performance that's more than competitive on the CPU side. The GPU is no slouch but is not top of the line (yet). Seems trivial to pair the ARM CPU with an external GPU.

So why would your phrase your argument as "it's not a game changer because it boosts if there's available power/cooling", rather than "it's not a game changer because Apple's CPUs are better"?

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