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Comment by jimmaswell | Hacker News Reader

I care vastly more about raw performance than energy usage for my home systems. I also have good reasons to care about the best single core performance. I don't see x86 going away that fast.

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FWIW, the current king of single core Geekbench is the M3 chips. Even the base M3 scores as high as the i9-14900K and higher than the Ryzen 9 7950X3D, at less than half their TDPs.

>FWIW, the current king of single core Geekbench is the M3 chips

Are we reading the same scores?

https://browser.geekbench.com/v6/cpu/singlecore

Do those scores even make any sense?

The top consists of what appears to be an Intel i3-10100 overclocked past 13GHz(!), a Ryzen 7 5800H at 2.8GHz, and then an i9-14900K at just below 800MHz.

That page ranks individual test run, so the top ranking are filled with outliers of internal system or crazily overclocked liquid cooled behemoth. When a CPU has appeared in sufficiently many test runs, the aggregate result, which is more representative of the real performance, will appear on https://browser.geekbench.com/processor-benchmarks.

The i9-14900K and M3 actually haven't appeared in the official chart, but you can search for them as they already have thousands of test runs[0][1]. Both of them score around 3100 in single core, and around 21000 in multicore (for the M3 Max).

[0]: https://browser.geekbench.com/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&q=i9-149... [1]: https://browser.geekbench.com/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&q=mac15

Besides

Besides quoting the chart, have a look at the tests themselves. I have commented quite a times why (some of) the tests are not well designed/executed.

Personally, I do not consider geekbench a viable kit.

Mobile, desktop, laptop, edge, server. These are the domains of compute. 4 out of the 5 domains value power efficiency. Laptop that were once x86 are now coming round to Arm because it really does make a better product i.e battery life and thermals. For the server, savings in energy and cost of chip manufacturing, datacentres and users both benefit.

>are now coming round to Arm because it really does make a better product i.e battery life and thermals.

ISA doesn't imply performance characteristics.

It's like saying that programming language (syntax) has performance implication.

No, it doesn't. Everything is up to the compiler, runtime and standard library.

Of course there may be some feature that make compiler's life easier, but still things are way, way more complicated than "just take ARM ISA and you'll be king"

https://chipsandcheese.com/2021/07/13/arm-or-x86-isa-doesnt-...

It's more the fact that power efficiency is something Arm values quite lot in their philosophy since their products are used in mobile and edge devices.

So you're talking about Arm as CPU design, not as the ISA, yup?

Until the Windows developer community actually cares about ARM, they will continue to be nice to have laptops that most consumers won't care.

Microsoft isn't Apple or Google in this regard, dragging developers into new worlds, and it is quite telling that they had now to put up some kind of ARM advocacy action.

https://blogs.windows.com/windowsdeveloper/2023/10/16/window...

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