MacBook Air is thin and fanless, so it can be done.
But then people also want fast.
Apple does this by buying out TSMC's capacity for the latest process nodes and then taking the performance/efficiency trade off in favor of efficiency, so they get something with similar performance and lower power consumption. But then they charge you $400 for $50 worth of RAM and solder it so you can't upgrade it yourself.
The thing to realize is that fans are not required to spin, and the difference between the faster and slower processors are the clock speed rather than the transistors. So what you want is exactly what the OP requested: A laptop with fans in it, but you can turn them off. Then the CPU gets capped at a 15W TDP, has basically the same single-thread performance but is slower on threaded workloads, and it's no longer possible for Chrome to make your laptop loud.
But if you want to open up Blender you still have the option to move up the fan slider and make it go faster.
What does HX 370 score at 10w?
But the result seems pretty obvious. Even the 7nm Ryzen U-series at 15W (e.g. 7730U) was beating the 5nm M1 on multi-threaded workloads and the HX 370 is well ahead of both on single-thread performance. Single-thread workloads aren't significantly power limited, so to not be the case the Zen5 HX 370 would have to be slower than the Zen3 7730U on threaded workloads at the same TDP, which seems unlikely.
Again, would like a source on that. Please no Cinebench R23.
https://nanoreview.net/en/cpu-compare/apple-m1-vs-amd-ryzen-...
Faster in Passmark MT, basically tied in Geekbench MT, faster in average MT score.
HX 370 vs. M1:
https://nanoreview.net/en/cpu-compare/apple-m1-vs-amd-ryzen-...
Faster in everything, ST and MT. ST difference is significant, MT difference is huge. Obviously this is expected because in this comparison AMD has the process advantage, but the expected thing is indeed what happens.
HX 370 vs M1, what's the perf/watt for SPEC and GB5/6 and Cinebench 2024?
HX370 consumes a lot more power. Hence, there aren't any fanless laptops available for it.
4 years later, AMD's chips still can't work in a fanless laptop.
At some point you just run out of benchmarks. The majority of benchmarks people ordinarily use already don't run on Macs.
> GB5 and GB6, M1 is faster in MT despite having 4 fewer cores.
It has the same number of cores as the 7730U. Half the M1's cores are E-cores, but that should be an advantage on a comparison at a given power level because E-cores have better performance per watt. The M1 gets within the margin of error of the same MT score on the benchmark you actually like even though the M1 is built on a newer process.
> HX 370 vs M1, what's the perf/watt for SPEC and GB5/6 and Cinebench 2024?
You keep asking for benchmarks that probably nobody has published.
> HX370 consumes a lot more power. Hence, there aren't any fanless laptops available for it.
It has a configurable TDP down to 15W. You can make a laptop that passively dissipates 15W. But you can also make a laptop with a fan in it which is capable of higher performance from the same silicon and then have a setting for "silent mode" that lets you switch between them at will. People generally like that better so that's what they make.
You just need GB5 or GB6. They are correlated to SPEC. Anything else is sort of worthless in 2024.
>It has the same number of cores as the 7730U. Half the M1's cores are E-cores, but that should be an advantage on a comparison at a given power level because E-cores have better performance per watt. The M1 gets within the margin of error of the same MT score on the benchmark you actually like even though the M1 is built on a newer process.
You're right, the 7730U does have 8 cores only. My mistake.
Why don't you supply your own sources? You're making a claim just the same as the OP, without providing any evidence in your favor. A good faith responder would do the legwork to provide a researched counterpoint.
To anybody that has actually been paying attention to CPU evolution over the years, the process node has clearly been the main differentiator between CPU performance. Intel had the process advantage and thus the CPU advantage, and now they don't.
Architecture matters too, but does not result anywhere near an order of magnitude difference, conventionally.
https://browser.geekbench.com/v6/cpu/compare/7292282?baselin...
Look at GB instead. GB is highly correlated to SPEC.
M1 is significantly faster in ST and MT while using a lot less power.
You are comparing a 7nm processor to a 5nm one, and yet the gap isn't even very large. Which was entirely the OPs point.
Does a 5nm AMD chip perform similarly to the 5nm Apple chip at the same wattage? (Again, performance does not increase linearly with wattage, as you're likely to cite something violating this logic in the next response)
You seem to not understand the point being discussed though, so no reason to discuss further
The gap is huge. AMD's 7nm chip typically uses ~5x more power than the M1 and is still slower.
>Does a 5nm AMD chip perform similarly to the 5nm Apple chip at the same wattage? (Again, performance does not increase linearly with wattage, as you're likely to cite something violating this logic in the next response)
No it does not. Apple's chips are significantly more efficient.
>You seem to not understand the point being discussed though, so no reason to discuss further
What is your point?
There is a lot of older hardware running like crap because Windows just bloats up.
That said, defaults seem often wrong and defaults matter. For instance, I recently got an HP Elitebook with an amd 7840hs because for some reason the _u version was tied to a lower res screen. By default it runs high powered and then the fan is loud enough to be annoying. Set it it to balanced or low power and the fan is inaudible.
The first is the timings, which is nominally real but it was never a huge difference. Moreover, the new CAMM standard aims to address this and basically does. The legacy SODIMM standard wasn't great and is essentially what caused this.
The second is the bus width. If you use slotted memory and want a wide bus then you need at least one slot per channel and then you could end up needing a lot of slots. This isn't impossible -- servers do it -- but there is a cost attached to it.
But this doesn't apply to systems that aren't using a wide bus. The base M3 has the same bus width as ordinary dual-channel PCs. The Pro has the equivalent of four channels or, for the newer generation, three. That's still not a crazy number in a high end system. With CAMM it would only be two modules, since the modules are each 128-bit. By way of comparison, Threadripper has four or eight channels and modern servers have dozens.
I think there's a fanless Asus ZenBook too, or the Surface Pro X.
https://www.notebookcheck.net/Huawei-MateBook-X-in-review-Ul...
Such as?
The difference is that a 4800U would be looking pretty bad vs a HX370 while the M1 still looks decent 4 years later (especially when that HX370 is unplugged).
https://sellout.woot.com/offers/apple-14-macbook-pro-with-10...
There’s very little reason to chase the exact latest model when even a 2020/2021 M1 family is still great.
(Though the use of the fan is always a configuration choice with thermal management in CPUs these days).