The Apple Neo was still 2x faster for graphics and around 1.4x faster for single core cpu. And remember the Apple Neo is running an iPhone CPU that is much slower than the M series.
It is strange that this chip is so crazy efficient though. I would love to know the details of exactly why it is? It seems like some new tech or process?
I do want 1.5x battery life for free out of my next laptop. Who wouldn’t?
The exact design of the cores, how they’re scheduled, the way background stuff is handled on MacOS. All of it. The chips are made on a fantastic process too, but that alone isn’t it. For example they’ve been putting the ability to drop refresh rate really low when nothing changes to more and more of their machines.
It could be that the Intel chip is close, IDK.
But add in other motherboard components, the screen, the OS, the software and system libraries, all are optimized together to hit those numbers. And any of those alone or in combination could be part of the differences.
The Intel chip holds its own for multicore in less bursty workloads, where the fans help.
* Web rendering and almost all web apps (see the JS number type)
* Most things in a game not done on the GPU
* Audio processing
* Most GUI processing/rendering
* Every miscellaneous/scalar calculation these days
Believe it or not, on a CPU this adds up to a lot more than the work you get doing AI processing.
You have a point about games, but the CPU is seldom the limiting factor.
Very few people are handling raw audio. For the rest, codec hardware beats everything else by a massive margin.
Being good at floats matters, but even float-heavy code generally has way more integers than floats making integer performance king.
They do in audio processing. ;)
Is this actually a thing? Macbook Pro goes up to 100 Wh and almost nobody goes above that because it's the highest capacity battery you don't need special permission to have in a carry on at the airport.
> But add in other motherboard components, the screen, the OS, the software and system libraries, all are optimized together to hit those numbers.
I always find this argument weird because there is so little actual "together" having anything to do with it. Are TSMC's current process nodes efficient? Yes. Can you save power by dropping the refresh rate? Yes. Do the teams doing these things need to coordinate with each other somehow rather than each doing their part independently? Not really.
The processor is this one: Intel Core 5 processor 320 https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/sku/246018/... in the Wildcat Lake series.
We really need to get over generalization like "phone CPU". Times have changed. Phone or not really isn't the focus.
Per core the A series (cough phone) isn't that much slower than equivalent M series. It's literally the same family just with some extra features, more power, etc.
It’s good Intel can match anything while staying cool and efficient. That’s a great step. But I’d like to see them match the M5.
Its only strange if you believe Apples lies.
The truth is, architecture doesn't matter. Single core performance, Apple was always on par with the best chips. Compute is compute, under the hood moving data costs energy, an you can't get away from that.
The reason for "efficiency" of Apple silicon it is because they spent a long time basically optimizing their chips for their specific hardware while running specific programs. Its like building an ASIC to specifically watch youtube vides. When it came to things that are not pipelinable (i.e a lot of branching), the efficieny/battery life statistics flew out the window.
Jokes aside, I don't think the engineering incentive case can be overstated. Apple has been working to squeeze every milliwatt of energy efficiency out of their chips since they started making their own iphone chips in 2010. Their chip is a win if it lets the user have phone battery longer.
Intel and AMD have never been on a power budget. Their chips are a win if they can crank the benchmark performance numbers just a little higher, electricity cost be damned.
This is what you get when you spend 15 years optimizing for energy efficiency per $ instead of raw power per $: a workstation cpu that doesn't even need a fan.