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Comment by wslh | Hacker News Reader

2025 and counting. Apple launched the M1 in 2020. I am an Apple user but not a fanboy but everyday I wonder about the magic in Apple that is unique because even established competitors with virtually infinite money and incredible processes can't move forward. Another incredible aspect is the early addition of an NPU by Apple in a SoC.

I would love to resurrect my XPS 13s with a durable battery and working in Linux without trigerring the fan. The same for my Lenovo Xs.

In my imagination I am waiting for the billionaire geeks doing their part for fun (e.g. energy management in Linux).

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> Apple launched the M1 in 2020.

which means the M1 was being worked on since at least 2018, I'd bet much earlier than that, for sure much earlier than that if you count silicon which never left the lab.

reminder iphones run on apple silicon since 2010, which means they had to be working on it at least since 2008. they have a lot of experience in silicon design by now.

My point holds even if they started earlier, companies such as Samsung has their own chips and they could also put notebooks on the market.

Why would Samsung do that? They have no sweetheart ARM licensing deal, they make more money selling their fab space to other customers.

Softbank could extend more generous architectural licenses to these businesses if they wanted to stimulate ARM PC sales. But they don't, so now we're here.

Qualcomm has had DSPs in its chips for a long time, providing a lot of NPU-like functionality before the term NPU had been coined. What Qualcomm currently calls its NPUs are just Hexagon DSP cores with specific instructions and abilities for matrix math and common inferencing datatypes.

The original Apple M1's performance per Watt and physical battery size may have been special when it first came out, but nowadays there's nothing special about its hardware specs relative to a modern x86 laptop.

The difference you perceive is mostly software. Windows and Linux are really just designed for desktop machines first and foremost. MacOS was too, but when they transitioned to Apple Silicon, they replaced a lot of the internals with stuff taken from iOS, and iOS is designed with batter life first and foremost.

Getting the level of battery life out of non-apple laptops is just going to be a long, hard slog of going through the operating systems and auditing *everything* and every design decision for how it affects battery life and how much resources its using.

Interesting, I thought Apple Silicon was still ahead on raw numbers, would you mind pointing me at any resources to learn more?

Is that still true when you consider the whole system power consumption vs performance? I was under the impression that Apple's ram and storage solutions give them a small edge here (at the cost of upgradability / repairability)

"raw numbers" always means a lot of things. Apple's CPU benchmarks are neck-and-neck in multicore and usually top-of-class in single-core performance compared to other desktop chips. x86 will draw more power when idling and during bursty workloads, but is typically more efficient during sustained SIMD-style workloads.

If you want an example of where Apple's design chops are pretty weak, look at their GPUs: https://browser.geekbench.com/opencl-benchmarks

The M3 Ultra is putting up some of the saddest OpenCL benches I've ever seen from a 200-300w GPU. The entry-level RTX 5060 Ti runs circles around it with a $400 MSRP and 180w TDP. I truly feel bad for anyone that bought a Mac Studio for AI inference.

Apple Silicon has a lead in performance per watt over the competition (not a gigantic one, but a real one nontheless), but we were talking about M1, which is 5 years old now and has no appreciable hardware advantages compared to an AMD or Intel laptop made in the last few years.

The reason an old M1 laptop gets better battery life is almost entirely a software difference.

Thanks for the explanation. I see where I got confused now

> Another incredible aspect is the early addition of an NPU by Apple in a SoC.

I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that you've not used CUDA yet. NPUs are a lot of things, but "incredible" is the last word an engineer would use to describe them these days.

Incredible means they follow a SoC approach where the RAM is shared between CPU, GPU, and NPU instead of separated like in a typical GPU such as Nvidia.

I consider the Tegra chip several times more incredible. What's so special about Apple's architecture to you?

Tegra was interesting for its time but saying it’s “several times more incredible” than Apple’s architecture is just opinion. Apple builds custom high-performance CPU/GPU designs with industry-leading perf-per-watt and tight OS integration. Tegra and Apple SoCs were built for very different goals, so the comparison only makes sense with concrete metrics, not broad claims.

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