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Comment by JohnTHaller | Hacker News Reader

> I'd guess this wins in absolute performance

No need to guess: An M2 Ultra will get around 27,000 in Cinebench R23 while this Threadripper will get around 100,000.

The M2 Ultra has a TDP around 90 watts (~ish according to a couple reviews) and this Threadripper has a TDP of 350 watts.

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There's some more nuance to efficiency than just max power at max load, of course. The Apple chips will likely have good efficiency compared to the lower core count (say, 32) TR because the watts per core gets high on those smaller TR chips. Yet if you compared their performance at a fixed 90w, I suspect the threadripper would come out ahead, since chips are much more efficient when at fractional loads that don't lead to boosted core clocks. Then again, at idle, the TR is probably guzzling power relative to the M2 Ultra. I'm only speculating to illustrate; a thorough comparison of their perf/watt characteristics would involve sampling many types of workloads of varying thread counts and levels of per-core saturation.

If you underclock the Threadripper to get a score of ~27k, then how much power will it use? I wouldn't be surprised if it was roughly equal to 90W, or even lower.

The stock configurations for a lot of desktop chips is to get the maximum performance at the expense of power, especially for things like these Threadripper series which are explicitly aimed at maximum performance. Often even drastically reducing power usage only gives modest performance penalties.

Yes, cutting power targets of a (Desktop) Ryzen to 65W or 90W reduces performance to around 50% or 80% in some benchmarks, iirc. Likely a good tradeoff in many scenarios.

I also run an RTX 3900 GPU at 60% power for 80-90% performance. It's a noticeable decrease in requisite cooling.

Yeah I am definitely not a fan of Intel/AMD/and even Nvidia who will completely push power to stupid levels just to get less than an extra 10% performance

Gamers Nexus did a video earlier this year comparing the 7950x at different eco modes and they found that putting the 7950x at a 105 watt eco made drop the performance around 5% but shaved almost 100 watts off of power. heres the link to the video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W6aKQ-eBFk0

I know why these companies do it and im lucky electricity isnt too expensive in my area but i rather shave 100 + watts of heat being dumped into my room (especially in the summer months)

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