Hacker News Reader

Comment by thimabi | Hacker News Reader

Nice to see they increased the number of performance cores in the M4 Pro, compared to the M3 Pro. Though I am worried about the impact of this change on battery life on the MBPs.

Another positive development was bumping up baseline amounts of RAM. They kept selling machines with just 8 gigabytes of RAM for way longer than they should have. It might be fine for many workflows, but feels weird on “pro” machines at their price points.

I’m sure Apple has been coerced to up its game because of AI. Yet we can rejoice in seeing their laptop hardware, which already surpassed the competition, become even better.

View on HN

I'm curious why they decided to go this route, but glad to see it. Perhaps ~4 efficiency cores is simply just enough for the average MBP user's standard compute?

In January, after researching, I bought an apple restored MBP with an M2 Max over an M3 Pro/Max machine because of the performance/efficiency core ratio. I do a lot of music production in DAWs, and many, even Apple's Logic Pro don't really make use of efficiency cores. I'm curious about what restraints have led to this.. but perhaps this also factors into Apple's choice to increase the ratio of performance/efficiency cores.

> Perhaps ~4 efficiency cores is simply just enough for the average MBP user's standard compute?

I believe that’s the case. Most times, the performance cores on my M3 Pro laptop remain idle.

What I don’t understand is why battery life isn’t more like that of the MacBook Airs when not using the full power of the SOC. Maybe that’s the downside of having a better display.

> Most times, the performance cores on my M3 Pro laptop remain idle.

Curious how you're measuring this. Can you see it in Activity Monitor?

> Maybe that’s the downside of having a better display.

Yes I think so. Display is a huge fraction of power consumption in typical light (browsing/word processing/email) desktop workloads.

> Curious how you're measuring this. Can you see it in Activity Monitor?

I use an open source app called Stats [1]. It provides a really good overview of the system on the menu bar, and it comes with many customization options.

[1]: https://github.com/exelban/stats

Cool, thanks for the tip!

> Curious how you're measuring this. Can you see it in Activity Monitor?

Yes, processor history in the activity monitor marks out specific cores as Performance and Efficiency.

Example: https://i.redd.it/f87yv7eoqyh91.jpg

Wow, I didn't even realize you could double-click the CPU graph on the main screen to open that view.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com