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kcb

AMDs comparison with the M4 Pro.

https://www.digitaltrends.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/3d-...

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Not shown: Wattage

100% chance its chewing through at least 50% more power to achieve the result.

Infact based on their TDP guidance, it goes up to 120w, which is more than double M4. But we don't know what the configuration was for this benchmark. We also don't have great numbers for M4's power consumption either.

Then you throw in the fact 120w TDP from AMD is not actually a power consumption figure... and it's all made up.

Not to mention what's the performance like on battery vs. plugged in. If I have to stay tethered to the wall in order to achieve the rated performance then it's not really an apples-to-apples comparison unless you only ever use your laptop at a desk (which is probably most people, honestly).

M4 Max is the most comparable to Strix Halo and while Apple does not appear to give an official power consumption, there are plenty of anecdotal reports of it using over 100W under load. For example:

https://www.reddit.com/r/macbookpro/comments/1hj3m0p/m4_max_...

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/m4-max-eats-battery.244...

M2 Max discharges in 2-3h when running ML models, and plugged into 140W brick.

M4 is likely more power efficient, but not 2x.

Source article of that (though it's actually linked in TFA as well) https://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/amd-mobile-processor...

Non-thumbnail version of the chart: https://www.digitaltrends.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/3d-...

What is the graph supposed to measure, actually? Renders are usually measured in seconds, so high=worse, but then clearly they highlight it as they're better, so it's the second-difference as a percentage or something?

Why can't companies just include absolute numbers in their comparisons...

It's first party marketing so always orienting the scale towards "higher=better=ours" and measuring via "whatever measurement gave the best numbers to present". They could give all the information in the world and I'd still wait and see what 3rd party reviews say the performance actually is rather than look into the 1st party number.

They're benchmark scores.

Betterness.

Shouldn't they compare Max+ to M4 Max?

They should but it’s not favourable. In their presentation they specifically said it outperforms the binned M4 Pro and is on par with the unbinned M4 Pro.

It would be behind the M4 Max. It’s also over double the wattage of the M4 Pro to achieve these numbers.

It's probably not cost nearly as much as a M4 Max so I'd say no.

Even M4 Pro is a big step up. M4 max is pretty expensive and I suspect AMD is targetting a lower price point, not that any prices were mentioned today.

256 bits * DDR5-8533 is a pretty big step up from any other x86-64 laptop or SFF and should be a pretty huge help for anything graphics or bandwidth intensive, like LLMs.

I'd expect laptops with this thing will be available at closer to the Pro (~$2k) than the Max (~$3k). I see a laptop with the 375 for ~$1700 right now, which is more comparable to the 10-core M4. Or in the minipc space, the 370 is ~$1k, which would again be comparable to a 10-core M4 mac mini.

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