The 22hr advertised battery life is definitely a side effect of this. I'm super curious how long it ends up lasting in real-world tests.
That's not to say there's no value in focusing on energy efficiency, especially for laptop chips; Apple Silicon was leagues ahead in energy efficiency when it launched, even if the gap is a lot smaller with newer Ryzen mobile chipsets. And speaking of Ryzen, the 5950X is a paragon of performance-per-watt in a desktop chip, which is of course still just as great as it makes it easier to power, cool and overclock. It's more to say that a shift toward focusing on energy efficiency could signal that they may be hitting road blocks in unlocking substantial performance improvements through better chip design alone, which of course makes sense, as its not like you can just linearly come up with design improvements every year forever, and they already came out swinging with their first generation chips.
The trouble for Apple is that although you can do this, they're paying the highest bid for first access to TSMC's new process, and doubling the core count would have used that much more die area. Which might have delayed the release as it takes more time to build up stock. So now we're into this weirdness where they give you a 22 hour battery life (how often are people awake for that many hours straight?) but they're getting outperformed by the Ryzen 7000 HX line on the older generation process node because it has more cores.
Before Apple came along and made people realize PPW is pretty damn important in the mobile/laptop space.
But that's the thing. Sufficient performance per watt is very important. Improvements to performance per watt are rarely unwelcome. However... you can mislead people regarding generational improvements when touting performance per watt metrics. If the design didn't actually improve much, a new process node and pumping more power in can cover a bit. Pretty much every vendor does this at some point, and even if Apple isn't currently doing this, pivoting towards touting the efficiency improvements rather than the raw performance is not a good sign, especially considering that these chips go in desktops too, and Apple still has some ground to cover if it wants to compete fully with high end desktop CPUs from the PC market.
The Lenovo Thinkpad I was also issued loses like 40% of its charge overnight, while "sleeping"....
My 14" M1 Pro rarely got more than 7 hours and my former work 16" M1 Pro more than 9 on a React workflow. When introducing VM work or anything fairly heavy to the mix take 2 hours off each. Typically at 50-60% brightness, have iStat showing load so I can catch any errant processes.
My biggest issue with this release is no published improvements in battery life. 22 hrs is for movie watching. Wireless web - of course very low load - is still 15 for the 16" and 12 for the 14", same as M2 Pro which is each just 1 hour more than the M1 Pro.
Program choices matter a lot. I gained about 30% battery life switching from Chrome to Safari, years back. I do have Teams and MS Outlook running all the time on that machine though, and they're not exactly slim.
I mainly got it to test out my PortableApps.com stuff running under ARM. I'm doing it now on a Macbook Air M1 with Windows 11 running under UTM.
You just named a few apps that are on Macs.
My original set was a regular full-fat Windows laptop, a super-cheap used Galaxy Book Go Gen1, and a used Intel Mac Mini. I later replaced the Windows laptops with the Thinkpad 13s. If it hadn't had video issues, I'd still be using that. But a used base model Macbook Air M1 serves the purpose for now.
I'll likely switch back to an Apple Silicon Mac Mini and a Windows laptop of some sort later as I much prefer a Windows laptop to my current Macbook.
One company shows up with a marketing budget and it's got triple the market share and is now up to the level that Mac traditionally held when all of the things "nobody makes for Linux" because "nobody uses it" supported that.
We're also at the point where things like bank websites don't "officially" support Linux, but as a general rule they don't have any problems on it, and if they did have problems it would be a problem the bank has to deal with instead of a problem the customer has to deal with.
Without the ecosystem who wants Windows? And what will it do for reputation of the vendor or Microsoft when people can't run their apps.
People are already buying non Apple ARM laptops. They are called Chromebooks. They can run Linux apps and Android apps. And thats more than most consumers would expect.
Is this a US thing where your school buys you a laptop?
It is a thing that is essentially an equivalent of an employer-provided work laptop, but for students and provided by their school.
In a way, Google's strategy of getting Chromebooks into schools may have backfired as they're largely seen as kids' computers.
I gave chromeos laptops to my family because they aren't trustworthy. Now they have reliable laptops and don't get virus infections or os problems.
1. The only reason you make people deal with Windows is backwards compatibility.
2. When you advertise it as a Windows laptop people will expect to be able to run their apps (they expect backwards compatibility). RIP your reputation and support inbox.
Yes, it will be harder to sell when it runs Linux. But it's the correct expectations management and at least it will suck less.
Oh well. This is what Google will do with their Chromebooks. Windows on ARM has the same future as the Windows Phone.
But then again at least one of them should have been doing that 20 years ago.
Where did you see that there was no ray tracing support? Qualcomm introduced hardware accelerated ray tracing in the previous generation.
I’m skeptical since Qualcomm has failed for years to catch up to Apple processors in the smartphone market. So why would their first effort in desktop processors be so much better?
Then, in early 2021 Qualcomm ended up acquiring Nuvia, and these new chips are the first showings of this acquisition. Naturally there's a lot of hype since said team represents a lot of the talent that made apple silicon so good in the first place.
It is no doubt promising that Qualcomm has brought in more talent, but it still takes time and effort to turn that into a best-in-class product. I’m not saying it’s impossible, though I’ll be skeptical of the hype until I see a real product.
Doesn't that also describe what Qualcomm has been doing?
If the premise is that Qualcomm hired a team of super talented engineers who can build a product that competes with Apple, then those engineers will still need time to develop a product.
Again, maybe their new processors will be everything they claim. It’s possible for this to happen. I’m just not willing to buy into the hype yet.
Given that they were confident enough to leave and start their own company, I'm not sure this is true. Indeed I wouldn't discount the value of high talent density.
> I’ll be skeptical of the hype until I see a real product.
They have shown real hardware demos [1] to reviewers already, and the numbers look solid. Obviously there are no comparisons vs M3 yet, but it seems promising.
[1]: https://www.anandtech.com/show/21112/qualcomm-snapdragon-x-e...
Again, it seems promising, but we’ll find out a lot more once a product is actually released that can be fully benchmarked and reviewed.
Right, and the guys who learned all the hard-won lessons along the way walked out the door to start a company, bringing along expert knowledge of Apple's designs and processes. And then Qualcomm bought them.
So on a surface level it seems implausible that QC could produce such a chip. But when you zoom out and go "oh, Qualcomm effectively bought Apple's senior chip engineers" it starts to make more sense.
It would be like if Qualcomm's top modem engineers started a company, which Apple bought. And then a couple years later Apple's long-running modem project mysteriously turned a corner and was ready to launch an exceptional modem. Like yeah, no kidding.
So yes, we need to see independent benchmarks and make sure it's not hype. But it's not so unbelievable that Apple's former top engineers could also produce a good a chip for another company. There's nothing magical about the Apple office--it's the engineers.
I’m not saying there’s something special about Apple other than the scale of their investment over a long period of time.
It’s the same deal for Qualcomm and their 5G modems. Apple no doubt has hired many talented engineers to make a custom 5G modem. But Qualcomm’s modem is still the best one around. It’s hard to catch up because Qualcomm has been investing heavily in that space for a very long time.
Again, that’s not to say Apple won’t ever catch up. Just that I wouldn’t expect that their first effort will be better than Qualcomm’s modems.
Taken at face value, that story is hard to reconcile with a sudden pivot to mobile.
Apple scaled iPhone first designs up to the M* Ultra chips. Going from HPC to a mid wattage laptop is definitely serious work, but I don’t think it’s impossible. Especially with ARM.
The whole point of this thread is that those same Apple engineers made these Qualcomm chips.
Yes. Apple iterated over many, many years. Learning so much along the way about how to make performant, efficient ARM designs.
And then a bunch of the most important of those guys left to start their own company.
And then Qualcomm bought that company.
Y’all are acting like a few college kids from Stanford made Qualcomm a new CPU over their summer internship. “It takes longer than that to make a good CPU.” Yah no shit!
Apple brought on PA Semi and then slowly iterated on actually shipping hardware for years. They didn’t hire PA Semi and have a best-in-class product on the first go.
Are you saying it’s a requirement that these guys ship a crappy chip first? Why? They already know how to make good ones.
Can you tell me what more they need other than their talent and years of experience to make a good chip? Because if it’s just “I demand they make a bad chip now because they’ve changed logos on their corporate polos” I don’t think this conversation has anywhere to go.