Hacker News Reader

Comment by ajross | Hacker News Reader

Dave 2D and Hardware Canucks had more or less the opposite take:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WH-qtuVRS2c

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Obtc24lwbrw

The Just Josh numbers you posted don't square with the ones above. It'll be a while before benchmarks settle, and as with all new devices there will be burps. We'll just see.

But taking a blind average of all of the above and applying to my own requirements perspective: I'm seeing a mid-range device with 80% the single-core performance of a M3 Max and significantly lower idle/regular-use power consumption. That sounds like a better device than a Macbook Pro to me.

View on HN

> I'm seeing a mid-range device with 80% the single-core performance of a M3 Max and significantly lower idle/regular-use power consumption. That sounds like a better device than a Macbook Pro to me.

Depends how much you focus on the AI parts of the announcement, I guess. I mean, the marketing makes this sound like their brand new, absolute highest end laptop CPU, not their mid-range laptop offering. This article is about an "AI Everywhere event" with a marketing presentation [1] talking about "leadership", "the latest LLMs" and "Local LLaMa2-7B".

Except when it comes to LLMs, it's critical to have lots of high bandwidth memory. The M3 Max can be configured with up to 128GB of memory at 300GB/s, whereas this caps out at 64GB of LPDDR5 and Intel haven't seen fit to mention memory bandwidth but for "LPDDR5/x 7467 MT/s" spec I can't believe it'll be any more than 100GB/s (which I guess is why they aren't mentioning it)

It's good to see Intel is paying more attention to ML, but they're clearly still playing catch up to Apple, let alone to nvidia.

[1] https://download.intel.com/newsroom/2023/ai/ai-everywhere-20...

You need to watch the dave2d video again he says the exast opposite of what you are saying here.

Ultra is just catching up with amd 7000 and idle consumption is bad compared to m3.

At what point does it not really matter anymore for desktops/laptops?

How common is the use case of full CPU loads for hours on battery? Or eeking a 10th hour of light-use autonomy?

If you use an Apple Silicon Mac you won't be asking that last question. Being able to reasonably go days without charging with regular usage is quite nice and opens this laptop up to new ways of being used. There's no other device in my inventory that I just don't have to worry about battery with.

My use case doesn't often pin cores these days, but I imagine the same goes for the full CPU load question. It's not common, because it's not possible. Enabling that enables new ways of using it.

And outside of traditional computer use, those questions are both easily answered if you consider handheld PC gaming devices. People post excitedly about their strategies and successes when they squeeze out an extra hour of game time on both the high and low ends.

My 14" M3 Max 128GB devours the battery in less than 1.5h when inferencing LLaMA 2 70B and is noisy as a SpaceX rocket... The same with my Zephyrus G14 7840U 4090 64+16GB.

I went into the office yesterday and forgot my power brick at home. I just got a new MacBook Pro with M2 Max so I figured I'd see how long I could go on battery before needing to borrow someone's charger.

I started the day at 7:30, worked most of the day on it with multiple apps open - Chrome, Safari, Teams, Slack, VS Code, IntelliJ, DataGrip, Postman, Outlook, etc. Connected to a wireless keyboard and mouse, and streaming music to my AirPods for a few hours of the day. Most of my actively used apps were IntelliJ, Chrome, and Teams (admittedly not doing a LOT of building/running Java cause I was resolving build issues for a chunk of the day). I ended the day at 4:00 with 47% battery remaining.

That was unheard of on my last i9 MBP that could barely survive a few hours on battery, even when it was new.

> Being able to reasonably go days without charging with regular usage is quite nice

No it's much worse than that for us Intel laptop users. Our machines make loud noises, overheat and throttle to the point where it affects Zoom video chats. The fan on my X1 carbon even comes on when booting the machine!

Meteor Lake is behind in both performance and efficiency compared to the M3 family.

https://www.notebookcheck.net/Intel-Meteor-Lake-Analysis-Cor...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com