Ahhaha, Intel's TDP is 2-4 times bigger under full load (and I guess ~10-15x under moderate load) while having negligible perf advantage over M2. The author can not be serious.
Never been a problem, even when Intel TDP was 20x worse than today.
EDIT: the author forgot that the tested system is an M2 Ultra a desktop class system with a TDP of 90 watts
The i9-13900T and i7-13700T come in at a max turbo power of just 106W
which is just 1.2x
When has Intel's real, advertised, or specified CPU power consumption or TDP ever been 20x that of the i9-13900KS?
so an average of 6.25 watts per core
which is less than a Pentium 90, a 1994 CPU running at 90Mhz
in absolute is not a 20x worse TDP, but it is relatively to the gain in frequency and performances (more than 20x actually)
No, the 13900KS has a nominal "TDP" of 150W. That's a marketing number, not a measurement and not even a control target parameter for the default boost management settings. Out of the box, a 13900KS in a typical desktop motherboard will happily draw more than twice that, indefinitely, if you can cool it and have a workload that can actually keep all of those cores busy: https://images.anandtech.com/doci/18728/13900KS%20Power%20Gr...
If you want to compare per-core power, you either have to use a power number for a workload that's actually loading all the cores, or divide the measured power by the number of cores actually in use.
Economically and environmentally it's absolutely a problem.
[citation needed]
Economically the Intel CPU of the 90s that had a very bad perf/watt compared to today's standards have been awesomely worth it
Environmentally, CPU have been getting better and better, the difference of a few 10s of watts doesn't really make any difference, unless you have numbers to back up your very strong claim.
> "... the difference of a few 10s of watts doesn't really make any difference, unless you have numbers to back up your very strong claim."
We have a billion power-hungry PCs running on the planet. Power-efficiency matters for economy and for environment, because power isn't free and only a tiny speck of the world runs on clean energy. It always mattered.
but yea it makes difference if the difference is
0.001% 0.01% 0.1% 1% 10% 1000%
AMD will add a bunch more watts to the idle number as their multi CCX CPUs just eat more power at idle. You'll be closer to 30-45 W idle. This is a guess, it's widely acknowledged but not really quantified that I've found.
AMD monolithic dies are more in line with Intel. IE the laptop/mini PC line will be nice and low.
The difference is vastly diminished when you add the display that's using 80 Ws. So that's 85 vs 100 W total system power? 15% difference that gets bigger when you peg your processor.
Apple numbers are better in pretty much every way on power. But we're talking a handful of watts. Even at really high power rates it isn't going to add to up much.
Sources: I have a Mac mini and an Intel raptor lake desktop. I take measurements. And I have read various sources. This is my best information.
Let's do some math.
According to [1] Human production of energy is even lower at an estimated 160,000 TW-hr for all of year 2019 (a COVID year)
Let's hypothesize the difference is on average 10watt/hour (rather large for the average device), the difference for a billion devices would be 10GW/hour.
Which is exactly 1/16,000,000th of the total.
Assuming every Apple computer consumes 100watts less than the equivalent non Apple, assuming there are 20 million new low power Apple computers (probably there are much less), assuming the CPU are 100% of the time in sustained mode (of course on average CPU do not run at 100% of the power all the time continuously, but let's assume they all do in this example) it would mean 2GW/hour saved, which corresponds to a 1/80,000,000th of the total.
It would allow, maybe, to shutdown an average power plant (the largest one produces 23GW/hour)
Unfortunately there are over 65,000 power plants in the World, 2,500 of which run on coal.
Unfortunately the energy saved could come from renewables, so the difference on emissions would be even less relevant than it already is.
Economically those 2GW even at the Denmark prices ($0.50/KW) would cost one million dollars (2GW = 2,000,000KW). AKA nothing.
As you can see the difference must be quite large to make a real measurable difference.
Now add in the GPU. Because the Apple number combined both.
The Mac Pro makes sense for only a few true professionals who need those PCI slots for non-GPU things. But those people are have BIG budgets to spend and are good customers.
Maybe the future Pros will improve, this one is a bit odd. But it has a purpose for those who truly need it.
Then there’s comparing like technology to like technology. Something like the 5700G AMD line, and that’s not even nvidia. But that probably isn’t as interesting to the authors.
This doesn’t matter for everyone’s use case, but it is a factor some people might consider.
I've never tried to water cool a 125 watt processor and so I can't speak to that. But especially if one uses air cooling or ideally passive cooling, one's ability to reduce noise is proportional to the chip's TDP. Noise reduction is important to many.