I also have a Xeon laptop. (45w TDP E3-1505m v6 in a dell precision).
Xeons are not magically faster than their i7/i9 counterparts (mine being not faster than a i7-7820HQ which is its contemporary flagship high performance mobile CPU). In fact they can be slower because the emphasis is on correctness and multi core, not usually single thread performance.
Xeons are also slower than a modern AMD chip which also can have more cores.
5x is a performance metric that doesn’t match up. Unless you have a desktop class 145w/165w cpu, in which case it’s not going to get 9hrs of battery unless you’re not actually touching the CPU. More like 30 minutes of heavy use on the largest battery legally allowed in laptops.
Edit: I just took a quick snoop on geek bench and found a modern xeon w in the largest dell precision laptop available:
Synthetic scores aren’t everything, but I’m hard pressed seeing how you can get 5x performance out of a chip that scores almost exactly half. Even with hardware accelerations like AVX512 (which causes a cpu to get so hot it throttles below baseline even on servers with more than adequate cooling.)
My experience as well. I, too, have a dell precision with a 8 core xeon part, and while it looks decent its heavy and not noticeably faster than the m1 I replaced it with when it came out. The xeon would get hot and noisy when running teams or hangouts. It sits in my drawer for the last year or so.
M1 does not. Code compile is about as fast. Battery lasts a 3 day business trip or a hackaton without charging. I never heard its fan. I dont care much about brands, but lightweight, fast enough and well built M1 is praiseworthy. I am not getting the pro or max, as the benefits for me as a software dev are probably not worth the extra weight and power consumption.
Citation please on “the Xeon dell smokes the M1 air”, geek bench says the M1 air can be twice as fast.
All other things being equal: your statement is simply not true.
I just checked and I can’t find a mobile Xeon with a greater TDP than 45w, so you’re stuck with that geek bench score because that’s essentially as good as it gets for a modern mobile Xeon.
Xeons, fwiw, are just higher binned i7s and i9s with features still enabled. The reason they can be slower than i7s and i9s is that the memory controller has to do more work and the way Intel does multi-core (essentially a ring bus) doesn’t scale gracefully always.
All things are not equal though. Geekbench includes many things that run on the GPU - video encoding and playback, rendering web pages - heck even your window manager mostly uses the GPU. The Dell has low power low performance GPU. To use the second one - an NVIDIA RTX, which is literally the fastest thing you can put in a laptop. You have to explicitly tell your OS to use that GPU for a program - it defaults to the low power one.
In summary, you are full of crap if you think an untuned blind geekbench score is what you're going by - an aggregation of a whole bunch of tests, using defaults. My statement is true, as I kick off the same data processing script on my laptop and it finishes it over lunch, while my coworker kicks it off overnight.
> Xeon with a greater TDP than 45w
yes, the Xeon W-11955M in the Dell is 45W. Now add the RTX GPU - which coincidentally will be doing most of the work. Unless you're running the geekbench test you're referring to, to purposely gimp the results. That Intel integrated graphics chip uses almost no power.
go process a large dataset and do some calculations on it. Run a bunch of VMs while you're doing it to - let's say 3. Give each one 32G of memory. Better be ECC memory too, or your data won't be reliable. Maybe in about 5 years when apple catches up to the current pro laptops, you'll be able to. This is why all the m1 comparisons they do is to previous generation intel chips in their old laptops. which have always been slow. apple has always used outdated hardware, in everything they've ever made.
Xeons are not magically faster than their i7/i9 counterparts (mine being not faster than a i7-7820HQ which is its contemporary flagship high performance mobile CPU). In fact they can be slower because the emphasis is on correctness and multi core, not usually single thread performance.
Xeons are also slower than a modern AMD chip which also can have more cores.
5x is a performance metric that doesn’t match up. Unless you have a desktop class 145w/165w cpu, in which case it’s not going to get 9hrs of battery unless you’re not actually touching the CPU. More like 30 minutes of heavy use on the largest battery legally allowed in laptops.
Edit: I just took a quick snoop on geek bench and found a modern xeon w in the largest dell precision laptop available:
Single core: 929 vs 1783 for M1
Multi core: 6718 vs 12693 for M1
https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/10517773
Synthetic scores aren’t everything, but I’m hard pressed seeing how you can get 5x performance out of a chip that scores almost exactly half. Even with hardware accelerations like AVX512 (which causes a cpu to get so hot it throttles below baseline even on servers with more than adequate cooling.)