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Comment by aurareturn | Hacker News Reader

  This is false, in cross platform tasks it's on par if not worse than latest X86 arches.

This is Cinebench 2024, a cross platform application: https://imgur.com/a/yvpEpKF

  They are willing due to lower idle and low load consumption, which they achieve by integrating everything as much as possible - something that's basically impossible for AMD and Intel.

Weird because LNL achieved similar idle wattage as Apple Silicon.[0] Why do you say it's impossible?

  May have been true when CPU manufacturers left a ton of headroom on the V/F curve, but not really true anymore. Zen 4 core's power draw shoots up sharply pass 4.6 GHz and nearly triples when you approach 5.5 GHz (compared to 4.6), are you gonna complete the task 3 times faster at 5.5 GHz?

Honestly not sure how your statement is relevant.

[0]https://www.notebookcheck.net/Dell-XPS-13-9350-laptop-review...

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This is Cinebench 2025, a cross platform application: https://imgur.com/a/yvpEpKF

You sure like that table, don't you? Trying to find the source of that blender numbers, I came across many reddit posts of you with that exact same table. Sadly those also don't have a source - the are not from the notebookcheck source.

The reason why I keep reposting this table is because people post incorrect statements about AMD/Apple so often, often with zero data backing.

For Blender numbers, M4 Pro numbers came from Max Tech's review.[0] I don't remember where I got the Strix Halo numbers from. Could have been from another Youtube video or some old Notebookcheck article.

Anyway, Blender has official GPU benchmark numbers now:

M4 Pro: 2497 [1]

Strix Halo: 1304 [2]

So M4 Pro is roughly 90% faster in the latest Blender. The most likely reason for why Blender's official numbers favors M4 Pro even more is because of more recent optimizations.

Sources:

[0]https://youtu.be/0aLg_a9yrZk?si=NKcx3cl0NVdn4bwk&t=325

[1] https://opendata.blender.org/devices/Apple%20M4%20Pro%20(GPU...

[2] https://opendata.blender.org/devices/AMD%20Radeon%208060S%20...

Weren't we comparing CPUs though? Those Blender benchmarks are for GPUs.

Here is M4 Max CPU https://opendata.blender.org/devices/Apple%20M4%20Max/ - median score 475

Ryzen MAX+ PRO 395 shows median score 448 (can't link because the site does not seem to cope well with + or / in product names)

Resulting in M4 winning by 6%

  Weren't we comparing CPUs though? Those Blender benchmarks are for GPUs.

Yes, but I was asked about Blender GPU.

Blender CPU tasks are highly parallel. AMD's Ryzen Max 395 has great MT performance. It's generally 5-20% slower in CPU MT than the M4 Max depending on the application.

> Weird because LNL achieved similar idle wattage as Apple Silicon.[0] Why do you say it's impossible?

And where is LNL now? How's the company that produced it? Even under Pat Gelsinger they said that LNL is a one off and they're not gonna make any more of them. It's commercially infeasible.

> Honestly not sure how your statement is relevant.

How is you bringing up synthetics relevant to race to idle?

Regardless, a number of things can be done on Strix Halo to improve the performance, first would be switching to some optimized Linux distro, or at least the kernel. That would claw back 5-20% depending on the task. It would also improve single core efficiency, I've seen my 7945hx drop from 14-15w idle on Windows to about 7-8 on Linux, because Windows likes to jerk off the CCDs non stop and throw the tasks around willy nilly which causes the second CCD and I/O die to never properly idle.

  And where is LNL now? How's the company that produced it? Even under Pat Gelsinger they said that LNL is a one off and they're not gonna make any more of them. It's commercially infeasible.

Why does it matter that LNL is bad economically? LNL shows that it's definitely possible to achieve same idle or even better idle wattage than Apple Silicon.

  How is you bringing up synthetics relevant to race to idle?

I truly don't understand what you mean.

> This is Cinebench 2024, a cross platform application: https://imgur.com/a/yvpEpKF

Cool, now compare M1 to AI 340. The AI 340 has slightly better single core and better multi-core. If battery life was all about race to idle like you claim then the AI 340 should be better than the M1.

See also Snapdragon X Elite, which is significantly slower than the AI 340, uses more power under load, so in total has much less efficient cores, and yet still beats the AI 340 on battery life.

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