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Comment by oofbey | Hacker News Reader

I think the Top500 benchmark is biased here. It’s a supercomputing benchmark which means it’s going to heavily weight SIMD and float64 performance, which are things that rarely matter for everyday computing. SIMD has uses in the real world - image or video editing, data crunching, graphics. But consumers basically never use fp64 any more, and so many modern chips have next to zero performance on them. That could easily skew the numbers in intel’s favor.

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I run a number of other benchmarks for a better comparison (linked from my blog post: https://github.com/geerlingguy/sbc-reviews/issues/111).

The Intel chip holds its own for multicore in less bursty workloads, where the fans help.

An interesting thing there is how much better the Geekbench scores are on Linux than Windows. Makes you think how the Intel/AMD chips would compare to Apple when both running the same OS. Or even just when both not being held back by Windows.

It's funny, too — in my testing with Asahi Linux, some benchmarks ran better on Linux than macOS on Apple Silicon!

What? Pretty much every general-purpose calculation on your computer that isn’t an integer is done with FP64. AI may not use it and games may prefer FP32 for many things, but your CPU certainly does a ton of FP64 work.

Which workloads?

Literally every workload not named above. It’s the default for a non-integer number.

* 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.

JS converts most number into 31-bit ints internally (which is why it’s so fast). GUI work often prefers int or f32.

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.

Quite a lot of web rendering is done with non-integer JS Number types, aka FP64. You are right that there’s a 31-bit integer optimization, but once you have a non-integer in the mix, it’s FP64. Many GUIs some time ago would use FP32, but in 2026 there’s a lot more FP64 out there than you give credit for.

Right but I've never seen these fp64 computations show up hot in a profile. I'm not saying they're not used but most of the work in a general computer usage in terms of profiles is in scalar integer code.

> consumers basically never use fp64 any more

They do in audio processing. ;)

I usually use fp32 for the sole reason I can fit twice as many ~24 bit samples per register.

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