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Comment by timschmidt | Hacker News Reader

Performance per watt is nearly identical for the Apple M4 and the Ryzen AI 9 HX 370, despite the Ryzen being manufactured on 4nm while the M4 is on 3nm: https://www.phoronix.com/review/apple-m4-intel-amd-linux/3

Sorry to burst your bubble.

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The biggest thing I want to see from framework is ARM (or better, Risc-V that achieves great low power performance) with an enormous battery and linux or BSD with all the optimizations to improve battery life.

I bought a macbook a while ago specifically because I can get it to last about 45-50 hours non-stop usage on one charge, so getting a system tailored for even better performance and a longer battery life (macbooks could probably double or triple battery life if they bulked up and stopped trying to be so petite) would be incredible.

>100 hour battery lifes should be very achiebable for developers, as limiting screen brightness and using only terminal with a black background can increase battery life _enormously_.

I agree that would be a delight. I'd even take a color eink or transmissive / reflective LCD to lower the display power draw. But I would still like to be able to equip it with large amounts of storage and ram.

Between Zoom (not the whole time, but just by having it in the background), Slack and Crowdstrike's Falcon agent, I usually can't make more than 5 or 6 hours away of a wall outlet with my MacBook Pro M2 Max...

I hate corporate software.

Oh, wow. That's a pity. I mean, you're down to the battery time of any random x86 laptop.

I usually get barely a working day out of my corporate MacBook Pro M1 with Corpo Security Special Sauce, CLion and Teams. But I have to kill CLion when it gets too crazy (i.e. often). Do you have any insights from Activity Monitor on who is draining the battery?

My biggest offenders: - Symantec Data Loss Prevention Agent (x86 Emulation) - $Corporation App Store (I never use it, don't know why it burns CPU time)

This corporate "security" software is the essence of everything that's wrong with a corporation.

If I check the "Last 12 hours app energy use" from my Activity Monitor it's usually Firefox, Zoom, Slack and PyCharm.

But that only shows "Apps", not processes. If I list all processes, the one that's almost always in the top is Crowdstrike Falcon. Specially when there's disk access, as it seems to intercept everything...

An Arm motherboard would be a great thing for one of those third parties to make. I don't think Framework has the resources to take it on right now. It's time for them to do an update to the AMD boards, and they do a new Intel one every year...

There are limits to how enormous the battery can be. Over 100Wh and you can't fly with it, so nobody is going to do that. That's less than double the capacity of the current Framework battery.

You charts show the M4 having a more than 2x advantage in both MIPS per watt and MB per Joule over the Ryzen

Read through the article. Ryzen wins a few, and from a worse node, and with off-package dram, and a much more capable GPU.

"off-package dram"

Yes, the real ARM vs. x86 discussion will come around Ryzen Max 2025Q1 with 128mb on-package dram (hope we get desktop board manufacturers to sell this).

what does 128mb on package dram help with? That seems like it's way to small to suspend to ram or anything.

"640kb should be enough for everyone"

Joke aside, typo, s/mb/gb/g - thanks for catching.

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