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Comment by dbspin | Hacker News Reader

> even the M5 laptops are consistently beat on performance and battery life by Intel Windows laptops.

When plugged in... This caveat is so enormous it should almost be legislated. If your computer use is at all portable, a computer that scales down to 20 - 40% of GPU power when unplugged is an enormously significant factor. So far as I'm aware (could be wrong about arm devices?) there's no non-apple laptop that operates at 100% speed on the road.

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Newer Intel Panther Lake chips perform the same or very similarly on battery as they do when plugged in - as do Qualcomm chips. However, I don't know where they're seeing "consistently beat on performance and battery life by Intel Windows laptops". Multi-core performance can definitely beat M5 in some configurations but single core performance is still fairly far behind and battery life is comparable again depending on the exact specifications and design of the laptop. I've seen analysis showing M5 is still the perf/watt king though regardless of configurations.

Sorry, poor wording. It's the Neo that's on the bottom in many reviews, but the M5 is regularly beaten by Windows laptops. My usage of "consistently" was in the sense of regularly beaten, not in the sense of always beaten.

So…inconsistently?

So consistently beats the M5 on something, just not on everything.

Have you tried Panther Lake or Wildcat Lake laptops?

Jesus, they're still calling their chips Lake? As in Skylake? As in 2012?

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/decoding-intel-code-names

Jesus, why does it matter? Don't you still have your name since birth? How lame!

Because the naming convention was used for chips based on Skylake microarchitecture (but with other differences such as process node). Not changing the name implies they've either changed the naming convention (why?) or they haven't improved the microarchitecture since 2012.

>they haven't improved the microarchitecture since 2012.

No, but they did beat 14nm like a dead horse for almost a decade. So you're not that far off.

Apple also is faster when plugged in

Citation needed. I've owned Apple laptops for many years - and I'm a video editor (amongst other things). If this is the case it's new behaviour.

This is a difference between selecting Highest or Automatic for performance under the battery menu item.

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