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Comment by legacynl | Hacker News Reader

Can somebody who knows about this stuff, please elaborate on if it's 'fair' in the first place to compare apple chips with amd/intel chips?

AMD and Intel chips run on loads of different hardware. On the other hand Apple is fully in control of what hardware (and software) their chips are used with. I don't know, but I assume there's a whole lot of tuning and optimizations that you can do when you don't have to support anything besides what you produce yourself.

Let's say it would hypothethically possible to put an M4 in a regular pc. Wouldn't it lose performance just by doing that?

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  Let's say it would hypothethically possible to put an M4 in a regular pc. Wouldn't it lose performance just by doing that?

Yes. But an M4 Max running macOS running Parallels running Windows on Arm is still the fastest Windows laptop in the world: https://browser.geekbench.com/v6/cpu/compare/13494385?baseli...

Yeah but an AMD/Intel CPU supports many different types of configurations. Isn't it unfair to compare a chip that only supports one configuration with one that supports many?

It feels to me like we're kind of comparing speeds between a personal automobile and a long haul truck. Yes, one is faster than the other, but that's meaningless, because both have different design considerations. A long haul truck has to be able to carry load, and that makes the design different. Of course they'll still make it as fast as possible, but it's never going to be the same as a car.

Basically what I'm saying is that because it's impossible to strip away all the performance and efficiency improvements that come from apple's total control of the software and hardware stack; is it really possible to conclude that apple sillicon itself is as impressive as they make it out to be?

Yes because it’s still the fastest SoC running Windows. Further more, consumers don’t care if AMD and Intel have to go into more configurations. They care about what they’re buying for the money.

> Further more, consumers don’t care

Well, I'm a consumer, and I certainly care. But I get your point that a lot of people just want a machine that allows them to browse for 10 hours without needing to be charged, and don't really care about anything else.

But do you also get my point? that on some level the chips/hardware are so different that it's like comparing apples to oranges?

That's absolutely wild. I've been loving using the 96GB of (V)RAM in my MacBook + Apple's mlx framework to run quantized AI reasoning models like glm-4.5-air. Running models with hundreds of billions of parameters (at ~14 tok/s) on my damn laptop feels like magic.

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