I have been out of the PC world for a long time, but in terms of performance efficiency, is Apple running away from the competition? Or are AMD and Intel producing similar performing chips at the same wattage?
It's partially because AMD is on a two year cadence while Apple is on approximately a yearly cadence. And AMD has no plans to increase the cadence of their Zen releases.
2020 - M1, Zen 3
2021 - ...
2022 - M2, Zen 4
2023 - M3
2024 - M4, Zen 5
Edit: I am looking at peak 1T performance, not efficiency. In that regard I don't think anyone has been close.
Indeed. Anything that approaches Apple performance does so at a much higher power consumption. Which is no biggie for a large-ish desktop (I often recommend getting middle-of-the-road tower servers for workstations).
It’s possible Apple’s chips could be dramatically faster if they were willing to use up 300W.
I remember seeing an anecdote where Johny Srouji, the chief Apple Silicon designer, said something like the efficiency cores get 90% of the performance of the performance cores at like 10% of the power.
I don’t remember the exact numbers but it was staggering. While the single core wouldn’t be as high, it sounded as if they could (theoretically) make a chip of only 32 efficiency cores and just sip power.
> they could (theoretically) make a chip of only 32 efficiency cores and just sip power.
Intel and AMD did that with their latest data-center chips to compete with Ampere and AWS’s Graviton. I’d love to build a workstation out of one such beast.
NEVER call me that ;-)!
If you want to evaluate the quality of two different architectures, you should be comparing samples on the same fab node.
M1 and Zen 4 were on the same node, and M3 and Zen 5 are on the same node. In both cases they're within spitting distance of one another.
The majority of Apple's advantage is just Apple paying for early access to TSMC's newest node.
Yet here we are, with the excuses of margins and silicon processes generations. But you haven't answered the question. Is Apple pulling ahead or is the x86 cabal able to keep up?
But is it, for the same power consumption?
The AMD mobile chips are right there with M3 for battery life and have excellent performance only I couldn't find a complete system which shipped with the same size battery as the MBP16. They're either half or 66% of the capacity.
Huh? I've used AC for both MBP and iPhones a number of times over the years, and never had an issue. They are known for some of the highest customer ratings in the industry.
They charged me $100 to get my machine back without repair.
Also bear in mind that the EU is a single market, warranties etc are, by law, required to be honoured over the ENTIRE single market. Not just one country.
Especially when the closest Apple Store to me is IN GERMANY.
I have since returned it to Amazon who will refund it (they're taking their sweet time though, I need to call them next week as they should have transferred already).
Sellers often will try to steer you to use warranty as it removes their responsibility, Amazon is certainly shady here. Apple will often straight on give you a full refund or a new device (often newer model), that happened to me with quite few iPhones and MacBooks.
Know your rights.
I'll keep buying from Amazon as their support is great and prices competitive. I don't trust Apple buying from them directly.
Today, Apple wastes my time.
Instead of the old experience of common sense, today the repair people apparently must do whatever the diagnostic app on the iPad says. My most recent experience was spending 1.5 hours to convince the guy to give me a replacement Airpods case. Time before that was a screen repair where they broke a working FaceID ... but then told me the diagnostics app told them it didn't work, so they wouldn't fix it.
I'm due for another year of AppleCare on my MBP M1, and I'm leaning towards not re-upping it. Even though it'd be 1/20th of the cost of a new one, I don't want to waste time arguing with them anymore.
Apple still makes good hardware but the scrooge attitude is disgusting for such premium products.
If a competing laptop has to run significantly hotter/louder than in my mind that’s not on par.
Java runs faster. GraalVM native generated native images run way waster. Golang runs faster. X86_64 has seen more love from optimalisations than aarch64 has. One of the things I hit was different GC/memory performance due to different page sizes. Moreover, docker runs natively on Linux, and the network stack itself is faster.
But even given all of that, the 16” M1 PRO edges close to the desktop. (When it is not constrained by anti virus.) And it does this in a portable form factor, with way less power consumption. My 5900X tops out at about 180W.
So yes, I would definitely say they are pulling ahead.
Which isn’t too surprising given a lot of the biggest companies in the world have been optimizing the hell out of it for their servers for the last 25+ years.
On the flipside of the coin though Apple also clearly optimizes their OS for power efficiency. Which is likely paying some good dividends.
The remainder can be attributed to compiler optimisations or lack thereof.
The M2-4 are still ahead (in their niche), but since the M1, Intel and AMD have been playing catchup.
Apple seems to be reliably annihilating everyone on performance per watt at the high end of the performance curve. It makes sense since the M series are mobile CPUs on ‘roids.
They gave it up for Core, grown from their low power chips, which took them far further with far less power than the P4 would have used.
No.
On the same node, the performance is quite similar. Apple's previous CPU (M3) has been a 3nm part, while AMD's latest and greatest Zen 5 is still on TSMC's 4nm.