ELI5: Why Apple's silicon consumption is so much better than AMD and Intel?
What the title says. How is it possible that Apple's M1, M2, M3 are so much better at power consumption and so much cooler than AMD and intel?
Apple does have a huge advantage, of having on package ram, which is easier (lower power) to drive at high speed speed.
There's endless people who will mindlessly repeat that ARM is more efficient x86, but it feels much more of a received dogma. Once you get past the decoder stage, there's far more in common than different between cores. The instruction set simply doesn't make a big enough difference.
Apple is using a combination of high-performance and high-efficiency cores (Big.LITTLE architecture), allowing the chip to balance performance and power usage based on the task at hand. They also include dedicated hardware for specific tasks (like video encoding/decoding), which can be more efficient than performing these tasks on general-purpose cores.
AMD and Intel design chips for a wide range of devices and systems, requiring a more generic approach. This limits their ability to optimise for specific hardware and software combinations. Apple designs chips solely for its own products, allowing for tighter integration between chip, hardware, and software.
Also, the question is what makes the architecture more power hungry. Originally there was this disctinction of CISC (intel/amd) vs RISC (arm/apple) but my understanding is that at least intel/amd have some cisc runnning on risc architecture, meaning, externally it looks like a cisc/x64, but internally is a risc or riscish.