Is the performance gap so huge? Power efficiency yes, absolutely, but for peak performance last I saw the last AMD vs M3 benchmarks were a slightly slower single core, and a little faster in multicore. Doesn't seem as world changing as described.
What brand?
2k buys you a decent thread ripper or 59xx series and as much ram as you can throw at it.
I bought the system mostly to increase the single core performance from the Ryzen 5 3600 I had before. As well as to get rid of all the little 256GB SSD disks I had in the previous one.
Mac laptops feel faster, even if the synthetic benchmarks say otherwise.
I’ve gone entire work days with my Pro on battery because I didn’t notice I hadn’t plugged it in. All my docker containers, IDE etc plugged into my external monitor. It was a good 9hrs before I noticed.
Macs are easy to beat depending on what trade offs you want to make though.
My M1 still holds right up! It is the smallest RAM model, and even that is not the end of things.
That said, I’ve never once felt that the M3 MBPs are sluggish. They are definitely super quick machines. And the fact that I can go a full day without charging even when using moderately heavy workloads is truly jaw droppingly impressive.
I’d definitely take the power performance over that small little extra saved in compile times any day of the week. So Apple have made some really smart judgements there.
I could get 7+ hours from my work Linux laptops battery and I don’t really care for macOS. The OS quality matters more than the touch pad to me. I’ve come the appreciate a Mat screen. But im glad there is choice.
EDIT: Also, I know the code in the link is awful; the point is doing a 1:1 comparison between the architectures.
[0]: https://gist.github.com/stephanGarland/f6b7a13585c0caf9eb64b...
And for data centers, same performance at better power efficiency means hundreds of thousands of dollars saved in power.