All of Microsoft's MacBook Air-beating benchmarks
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theverge.com
TOPS (Trillion Operations Per Second) is a meaningless score without including the precision. Are they INT4, INT8, INT16 or FP16? Microsoft's qualifications for a Copilot+ laptop require 40 TOPS at INT8: https://www.theregister.com/2024/05/21/qualcomm_windows_micr.... The new Snapdragon X Elite can do 45 TOPS at INT8.
Apple's M3 has 18 TOPS, and their M4 has 38 TOPS, but the M3 was measured at INT16 and the M4 at INT8: https://www.anandtech.com/show/21387/apple-announces-m4-soc-.... Cutting the precision in half lets you do ~twice the amount of work.
The Snapdragon is very impressive, but it's silly to see TOPS claims from companies repeated by journalists without adding some context.
I don’t want Windows. I don’t want MacOS. I want a thin, efficient, fast, light, affordable replacement for my aging Latitude 7370 running Linux.
Plus many people working in tech have specific systems for specific tasks; I use a spec'ed up Windows laptop for heavy lifting and games, and an M1 Air as my main computer.
I know deep down that thinnest laptops with brightest displays sells the most in reality, marketing wise, but it just sounds a bit hypocritical to me.
This was in stark contrast to contemporaries where any semblance of decent battery life required low power mode, which made them dog slow. Even today this is something that x86 laptops with current chips struggle with… there are a handful of x86 ultraportables that can get M1 MBA like battery life, but they have larger batteries than the MBA had and still need low power mode to pull it off reliably.
That’s where a lot of the hype around “M-series SoC is capable of X performance” is rooted. It’s not the performance in and of itself, but the perf per watt, which allows that performance without also turning the laptop into a furnace/jet or destroying battery life.
Linux 6.10 has some drivers for hardware on the Snapdragon X Elite platform[2].
That said, Linux support does not come down to just SoC support. Each device using the Snapdragon platform will need support from manufacturers or volunteers to get Linux running on them, as they'll need DeviceTrees written for them, drivers for peripherals and whatnot.
[1] https://www.qualcomm.com/developer/blog/2024/05/upstreaming-...
I ran some tests, and completely idle at 30% brightness I can get 7h under Linux and 8h under Windows, so Linux still has some room for improvement. But as someone who uses Windows at work, there is no way I could go back to that personally. Not unless they released an open source version completely cleaned of crapware and bloat. The Enterprise / IOT versions are the closest I’ve come to that.
And if it runs Linux, how much of the impressive battery optimizations am I going to sacrifice?
* 12 big cores vs 4p+4e CPU
* active vs passive cooling
* Ignoring that M4 exists
* completely avoids single-thread performance even though that's what is most important to laptop users.
Does Apple also have to somehow properly benchmark against the not-yet-available highest end models of their competitor's chips for their numbers to not be wrong?
It looks like it hasn't even been a month since the M4 was publicly announced, I think it's fair that that's just too soon for the benchmarks to make it into these early comparisons.
I don't think so, but it is a risky position to take. Presumably plans to publicly lean on that benchmark were in flight before the M4 was announced, so they went ahead with it anyway.
I think it's risky because: assuming the M4 delivers the performance we'd expect from another Apple Silicon evolution - and releases in non-mobile devices this year - your marketing headline effectively becomes "hey, our best is only better than our competitor's last generation [and our competitors are already better]"
AMD/Intel can always just lose gracefully and go again next year. For Microsoft trying to decide how much they're investing in ARM, going all in on "we're better than the Macbook Air" when there's a good chance Apple is going to blow them out of the water in a few weeks is a much bigger gamble. It's possible Apple's announcements aren't that impressive in some dimension, but even if it's in the same range, it could really dampen Microsoft's push here.
But there are numerous issues, that might be discovered later:
1. Similarly to the MBP because Surface will be more powerful than MBA, after you install all the default apps you need, and various Electron apps (like Slack) and updater like Microsoft Office, Google Chrome, will keep running in the background, you will never see 20 hours on the battery. This is the reason why I like MBA comparing to my MBP M2 Max, just because this chip cannot drain battery that fast.
2. Microsoft did a smart thing, announcing those laptops a few weeks before WWDC, but planning to ship them only after WWDC. So apple cannot play back and release M4 MBA on WWDC and show how much faster it can be comparing to Surface. Just because there is nothing to compare.
3. The quality of the Surface devices seems like it was always questionable.
Anyway, I am really excited about ARM powered Windows laptops, for multiple reasons. At the end I hope to see Bootcamp again, maybe games will be optimized for ARMs, and we will be able to play games on MBP with Bootcamp :D
> While I’ve covered Microsoft’s confidence in beating Apple’s M3 processor previously, I thought it would be useful to examine all of the benchmark
Right! So...
> I wasn’t able to run the benchmarks myself,
CTRL-W
People have been doing mods which transfer the heat to the frame. This gives big performance boost at the expense of hot computer on your lap.
What I like about Linux and macOS is that performance remains stable and battery life is excellent.
Microsoft's requirement for these 1st gen "AI PC" is 45 TOPS of NPU performance, M4 "faster than any existing AI PC" is 38 TOPs advertised.
It's marketing. Both sides. And those are just ARM laptop CPUs after all.
The HN crowd is probably in alignment against, but Windows still rules outside of the major metros and tech sector. Sadly.
You're free to not like it, but if you're still holding on to that list of reasons, it's a bit like abandoning Windows because of the W10 rebooting issues and disliking the original Surface. There's been a lot of change and there's other options.
Mac doesn't rule the Metro areas. It simply rules in the West coast-centric, relatively wealthy crowd that is a high percentage of the HN readers.
And there ladies and gentlemen is the catch... What a totally laughable and unfair comparison. Wake me up when it's fanless
"There's nothing wrong with fans" -- sure nothing wrong with them as long as you don't mind the extra noise, energy usage, point of failure and an entry point for dust and other crap into your laptop.
Give me a break! Passive cooling is the future for personal computing.