Comment by 015a | Hacker News Reader

Comment by 015a | Hacker News Reader

iPhone 13 Pro, with A15 Bionic, scored around 2250 Geekbench 6 single core. M2 Max, more-so around 2800. These two chips are comparable because they use the same microarchitecture, and it indicates a ~20-25% uplift in single core mostly just through pushing more power through the chip.

If they can drive the same increase with an M3 chip based on the A17 Pro microarchitecture, a single-core score of 3500 is within reach. For a laptop.

Comparison: the i9 13900KS, the current stock single-core performance champion, can push 3100 with excellent cooling; and it reaches this blistering performance (~10% faster than an M2 Ultra) by, singularly, drawing upward of 220 watts from the wall [1]. The Ryzen 7900x isn't far behind, in both metrics. An entire M2 Max SoC peaks at around 90 watts, and there's evidence that the CPU in isolation draws closer to 35 watts [2].

It cannot be understated how far ahead Apple is.

[1] https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/intel-core-i9-13900ks-c...

[2] https://www.notebookcheck.net/Apple-M2-Max-Processor-Benchma...

That sounds overstated.

https://www.notebookcheck.net/AMD-Ryzen-9-7940HS-analysis-Ze...

Current laptop AMD chips have about the same efficiency as M2 Pro, when throttled to similar wattage (see the section about 35W). Instead they default to more power and being more powerful, while being vastly cheaper (M2 Pro Mac mini with 32gb of ram and 2tb of SSD costs what?).

So yeah, for a laptop chip apple is ahead, but it is pretty easy to overstate by how much.

??? How is this supported by your article? Looking at the only perf/watt benchmark (Cinebench ST), they show:

M2 Pro @ 141 points/watt Ryzen 9 7940HS @ 47 points/watt

> when throttled to similar wattage (see the section about 35W)

I can't wait for AMD chips on 3nm so we can see if it really is "just the advantage of the process" like a lot of folk say.

It's already proven that it's not just the node advantage. Just compare Apple's 7nm A series chips to Zen3 or M2 to Zen4. The power advantage for Apple is 3x - 10x.

Apple’s (or actually TSMC’s) advanced packaging makes communication between dies faster. I think that some of the performance gains come from a lower number of clockticks required for accessing memory on an Apple chip.

your overall point is valid, but it’s somewhat misleading to compare single core performance alongside total SoC power.

Actually, it's way worse for Intel and AMD if you only use single core power.

If you run Geekbench 5 or 6 on an M1, the total package power ranges 0.3w - 5w, mostly staying below 3w. Intel and AMD can use 10x or more power to achieve similar or lower Geekbench scores.

I think you meant to say that it cannot be overstated how far ahead Apple is ;)

The 7900x3d has the same performance but uses 50w less than the 7900x

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