If you fully load the CPU and calculate how much energy a AI340 needs to perform a fixed workload and compare that to a M1 you'll probably find similar results, but that only matters for your battery life if you're doing things like blender renders, big compiles or gaming.

Take for example this battery life gaming benchmark for an M1 Air: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jYSMfRKsmOU. 2.5 hours is about what you'd expect from an x86 laptop, possibly even worse than the fw13 you're comparing here. But turn down the settings so that the M1 CPU and GPU are mostly idle, and bam you get 10+ hours.

Another example would be a ~5 year old mobile qualcomm chip. It's a worse process node than an AMD AI340, much much slower and significantly worse performance per watt, and yet it barely gets hot and sips power.

All that to say: M1 is pretty fast, but the reason the battery life is better has to do with everything other than the CPU cores. That's what AMD and Intel are missing.

> If I open too many tabs in Chrome I can feel the bottom of the laptop getting hot, open a YouTube video and the fans will often spin up.

It's a fairly common issue on Linux to be missing hardware acceleration, especially for video decoding. I've had to enable gpu video decoding on my fw16 and haven't noticed the fans on youtube.

Apple spent years incrementally improving efficiency and performance of their chips for phones. Intel and AMD were more desktop based so power efficiency wasnt the goal. When Apple's chips got so good they could transition into laptops, x86 wasn't in the same ballpark.

Also the iPhone is the most lucrative product of all time (I think) and Apple poured a tonne of that money into R&D and taking the top engineers from Intel, AMD, and ARM, building one of the best silicon teams.

NeXT? But yes, I completely get what you’re saying, I just couldn’t resist. It was an amazingly long sighted strategic move, for sure.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Atom

MeeGo proceeded far too slowly and Elop chose his former employers' Windows instead in 2011. Nokia's decline only increased and Intel hired many Nokia engineers.

Soon Nokia made no phone anymore and Intel did not even manage to make their first mass-selling product.

ARM-based SoCs were 10 years ahead in power saving. The ARM ecosystem did not make any fatal mistakes, Intel never caught up.

To me the Atom team always felt like a dead-end inside intel - everyone seemed to be trying to get in to a different higher-status team ASAP - our engineering contacts often changed monthly, if we even knew who our "contacts" were meant to be at any time. I think any product developed like that would struggle.

but do not forget how focused they (amd/intel, esp in opteron days -- edit) were on the server market.

how much silicon did Apple actually create? I thought they outsourced all the components?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P.A._Semi

The Newton was long before the iPaq, the MessagePad was released in 1993.

Q> And latter - was it that it looked that Apple maybe in danger of going under, and then they sold their ARM stake and got a cash injection that way?

A> And yes. In the late-1990s turnaround, Apple sold down its ARM stake in multiple tranches after ARM’s 1998 IPO, realizing hundreds of millions of dollars that helped shore up finances (alongside the well-known $150 million Microsoft deal in Aug 1997).

CPU, GPU, neural processor, image signal processor, U1 chip for device tracking, Secure Enclave for biometrics, a 5G modem (only used in the 16e so far)…

They don’t manufacture the chips in house of course. They contract that out to TSMC and other companies.

You get the ARM ISA, and compilers that work for ARM will compile to Apple Silicon. It's just that the actual hardware you get, is better than the base design, and therefore beats other ARM processors in benchmarks.

More likely it was derived from PWRficient, or a clean sheet design that took lessons from it.

All they care about is that companies buy an ARM license, not that they use the boilerplate ARM CPU design.

Those designs are there to make it easier for companies to make ARM-based chips who would otherwise never be able to design their own.

https://www.electronicsweekly.com/news/business/finance/arm-...

It is very unlikely Apple uses anything from ARM’s core designs, since that would require paying an additional license fee and Apple was able to design superior cores using its architectural license.

See Lunar Lake on TSMC N3B, 4+4, on-package DRAM versus the M3 on TSMC N3B, 4+4, on-package DRAM: https://youtu.be/ymoiWv9BF7Q?t=531

The 258V (TSMC N3B) has a worse perf / W 1T curve than the Apple M1 (TSMC N5).

Also, there's the obvious benefits of being TSMC's best customer. And when you design a chip for low power consumption, that means you've got a higher ceiling when you introduce cooling.

Im not wrong!

https://chipsandcheese.com/p/arm-or-x86-isa-doesnt-matter

https://chipsandcheese.com/p/why-x86-doesnt-need-to-die

All instructions across x86 and Arm are being decoded to micro-operations, which are implementation specific. You could have an implementation which prioritizes performance, or an implementation that prioritizes power consumption, regardless of the ISA.

Decoding instructions, particularly on a modern die, doesn’t consume a significant amount of area or power, even for complicated variable length instructions.

If all that's true then why does Snapdragon have better battery life? As I said in my comment the great battery life comes from when the CPU isn't being used. It's everything else around it. That's where AMD is still significantly behind.

Apple is vertically integrated and can optimize at the OS and for many applications they ship with the device.

Compare that to how many cooks are in the kitchen in Wintel land. Perfect example is trying to get to the bottom of why your windows laptop won't go to sleep and cooks itself in your backpack. Unless something's changed, last I checked it was a circular firing squad between laptop manufacturer, Microsoft and various hardware vendors all blaming each other.

> Compare that to how many cooks are in the kitchen in Wintel land. Perfect example is trying to get to the bottom of why your windows laptop won't go to sleep and cooks itself in your backpack

So, I was thinking like this as well, and after I lost my Carbon X1 I felt adventurous, but not too adventurous, and wanted a laptop that "could just work". The thinking was "If Microsoft makes both the hardware and the software, it has to work perfectly fine, right?", so I bit my lip and got a Surface Pro 8.

What a horrible laptop that was, even while I was trialing just running Windows on it. Overheated almost immediately by itself, just idling, and STILL suffers from the issue where the laptop sometimes wake itself while in my backpack, so when I actually needed it, of course it was hot and without battery. I've owned a lot of shit laptops through the years, even some without keys in the keyboard, back when I was dirt-poor, but the Surface Pro 8 is the worst of them all, I regret buying it a lot.

I guess my point is that just because Apple seem really good at the whole "vertically integrated" concept, it isn't magic by itself, and Microsoft continues to fuck up the very same thing, even though they control the entire stack, so you'll still end up with backpack laptops turning themselves on/not turning off properly.

I'd wager you could let Microsoft own every piece of physical material in the world, and they'd still not be able to make a decent laptop.

That's why Apple is good at making a whole single system that works by itself, and Microsoft is good at making a system that works with almost everything almost everyone has made almost ever.

I don't think that really counts as vertical integration.

The 2nd biggest disappointment was when I ran my team's compute-heavy workload locally, expecting blistering performance from the i9, only to find that the CPU got throttled to under 50% (I seem to recall 47%, but my memory is fuzzy), within 6 seconds of starting the workload. And this was essentially a brand new laptop, so it likely wasn't blocked fan intakes. I fail to see the point of putting a CPU in a laptop that your thermal design simply can't handle.

I've had a few Surface Book 2's for work, and they were fine except: needed more RAM, and there was some issue with connection between screen and base which make USB headsets hinky.

> Perfect example is trying to get to the bottom of why your windows laptop won't go to sleep and cooks itself in your backpack

Same thing happens in Apple land: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44745897. My Framework 16 hasn't had this issue, although the battery does deplete slowly due to shitty modern standby.

> Framework 16

> The 2nd Gen Keyboard retains the same hardware as the 1st Gen but introduces refreshed artwork and updated firmware, which includes a fix to prevent the system from waking while carried in a bag.

  All that to say: M1 is pretty fast, but the reason the battery life is better has to do with everything other than the CPU cores. That's what AMD and Intel are missing.

Apple Silicon is 2-4x more efficient than AMD and Intel CPUs during load while also having higher top end speed.

Another thing that makes Apple laptops feel way more efficient is that they use a true big.Little design while AMD and Intel's little cores are actually designed for area efficiency and not power efficiency. In the case of Intel, they stuff as many little cores as possible to win MT benchmarks. In real world applications, the little cores are next to useless because most applications prefer a few fast cores over many slow cores.

This is false, in cross platform tasks it's on par if not worse than latest X86 arches. As others pointed out: 2.5h in gaming is about what you'd expect from a similarly built X86 machine.

They are willing due to lower idle and low load consumption, which they achieve by integrating everything as much as possible - something that's basically impossible for AMD and Intel.

> The faster the CPU can finish a task, the faster it can go back to sleep, aka race to sleep.

May have been true when CPU manufacturers left a ton of headroom on the V/F curve, but not really true anymore. Zen 4 core's power draw shoots up sharply pass 4.6 GHz and nearly triples when you approach 5.5 GHz (compared to 4.6), are you gonna complete the task 3 times faster at 5.5 GHz?

  This is false, in cross platform tasks it's on par if not worse than latest X86 arches.

  They are willing due to lower idle and low load consumption, which they achieve by integrating everything as much as possible - something that's basically impossible for AMD and Intel.

  May have been true when CPU manufacturers left a ton of headroom on the V/F curve, but not really true anymore. Zen 4 core's power draw shoots up sharply pass 4.6 GHz and nearly triples when you approach 5.5 GHz (compared to 4.6), are you gonna complete the task 3 times faster at 5.5 GHz?

[0]https://www.notebookcheck.net/Dell-XPS-13-9350-laptop-review...

You sure like that table, don't you? Trying to find the source of that blender numbers, I came across many reddit posts of you with that exact same table. Sadly those also don't have a source - the are not from the notebookcheck source.

For Blender numbers, M4 Pro numbers came from Max Tech's review.[0] I don't remember where I got the Strix Halo numbers from. Could have been from another Youtube video or some old Notebookcheck article.

Anyway, Blender has official GPU benchmark numbers now:

M4 Pro: 2497 [1]

Strix Halo: 1304 [2]

So M4 Pro is roughly 90% faster in the latest Blender. The most likely reason for why Blender's official numbers favors M4 Pro even more is because of more recent optimizations.

Sources:

[0]https://youtu.be/0aLg_a9yrZk?si=NKcx3cl0NVdn4bwk&t=325

[1] https://opendata.blender.org/devices/Apple%20M4%20Pro%20(GPU...

[2] https://opendata.blender.org/devices/AMD%20Radeon%208060S%20...

Here is M4 Max CPU https://opendata.blender.org/devices/Apple%20M4%20Max/ - median score 475

Ryzen MAX+ PRO 395 shows median score 448 (can't link because the site does not seem to cope well with + or / in product names)

Resulting in M4 winning by 6%

  Weren't we comparing CPUs though? Those Blender benchmarks are for GPUs.

Blender CPU tasks are highly parallel. AMD's Ryzen Max 395 has great MT performance. It's generally 5-20% slower in CPU MT than the M4 Max depending on the application.

And where is LNL now? How's the company that produced it? Even under Pat Gelsinger they said that LNL is a one off and they're not gonna make any more of them. It's commercially infeasible.

> Honestly not sure how your statement is relevant.

How is you bringing up synthetics relevant to race to idle?

Regardless, a number of things can be done on Strix Halo to improve the performance, first would be switching to some optimized Linux distro, or at least the kernel. That would claw back 5-20% depending on the task. It would also improve single core efficiency, I've seen my 7945hx drop from 14-15w idle on Windows to about 7-8 on Linux, because Windows likes to jerk off the CCDs non stop and throw the tasks around willy nilly which causes the second CCD and I/O die to never properly idle.

  And where is LNL now? How's the company that produced it? Even under Pat Gelsinger they said that LNL is a one off and they're not gonna make any more of them. It's commercially infeasible.

  How is you bringing up synthetics relevant to race to idle?

Cool, now compare M1 to AI 340. The AI 340 has slightly better single core and better multi-core. If battery life was all about race to idle like you claim then the AI 340 should be better than the M1.

See also Snapdragon X Elite, which is significantly slower than the AI 340, uses more power under load, so in total has much less efficient cores, and yet still beats the AI 340 on battery life.

This is not true. For high-throughput server software x86 is significantly more efficient than Apple Silicon. Apple Silicon optimizes for idle states and x86 optimizes for throughput, which assumes very different use cases. One of the challenges for using x86 in laptops is that the microarchitectures are server-optimized at their heart.

ARM in general does not have the top-end performance of x86 if you are doing any kind of performance engineering. I don't think that is controversial. I'd still much rather have Apple Silicon in my laptop.

  For high-throughput server software x86 is significantly more efficient than Apple Silicon.

That said, Graviton is at least 50% of all AWS deployments now. So it's winning vs x86.

  ARM in general does not have the top-end performance of x86 if you are doing any kind of performance engineering. I don't think that is controversial.

But I am purely guessing ARM has risen their price per core so it makes less financial sense to do a yearly update on CPU. They are also going into Server CPU business meaning they now have some incentives to keep it all to themselves. Which makes the Nvidia moves really smart as they decided to go for the ISA licences and do it by themselves.

I've worked in video delivery for quite a while.

If I were to write the law, decision-makers wilfully forcing software video decoding where hardware is available would be made to sit on these CPUs with their bare buttocks. If that sounds inhumane, then yes, this is the harm they're bringing upon their users, and maybe it's time to stop turning the other cheek.

Are you telling me that for some reason it's not using any hardware acceleration available while watching YouTube? How do I fix it?

Bluetooth is also 2.4 Ghz.

You check it by putting chrome://gpu in the address bar.

A good demonstration is the Android kernel. By far the biggest difference between it and the stock Linux kernel is power management. Many subsystems down to the process scheduler are modified and tuned to improve battery life.

What are some examples of power draw savings that Linux is leaving on the table?

“Modern Standby” could be made to actually work, ACPI states could be fixed, a functional wake-up state built anew, etc. Hell, while it would allow pared down CPUs, you could have a stop-gap where run mode was customized in firmware.

Too much credit is given to Apple for “owning the stack” and too little attention to legacy x86 cruft that allows you to run classic Doom and Commander Keen on modern machines.

Where do you get this from? I could understand that they could get rid of the die area devoted to x86 decoding, but as I understand it x86 and x86-64 instructions get interpreted by the same execution units, which are bitness blind. What makes you think it's x86 support that's responsible for the vast majority of power inefficiency in x86-64 processors?

Reduced I-Cache, uop cache, and decoder pressure would also have a beneficial impact. On the flip side, APX instructions would all be an entire byte longer than their AMD64 counterparts, so some of the benefits would be more muted than they might first appear and optimizing between 16 registers and shorter instructions vs 32 registers with longer instructions is yet another tradeoff for compilers to make (and takes another step down the path of being completely unoptimizable by humans).

Sure, but the topic is optimizing power efficiency by removing support for an instruction set. That aside, if an instruction isn't very performant, it isn't much of an issue per se. It just means it won't get used much and so chip design resources will be suboptimally allocated. That's a problem for Intel and AMD, and for nobody else.

(M1 does, because they don't implement aarch32, or thumb).

>Operating systems need to carry the baggage in x86 if they want to allow users to run on old and new processors.

What do you mean by this exactly? Are you talking about hybrid execution like WOW64, or simple multi-platform support like the Linux kernel?

WOW64 is irrelevant as far as power efficiency is concerned if the user doesn't run any x86 software. If the user is running x86 software, that's a reason not to remove that support.

Multi-platform support shouldn't have an effect on power efficiency, beyond complicating the design of the system. Saying that the Linux kernel should stop supporting x86 so x86-64 can be more power-efficient is like saying that it should stop supporting... whatever, PowerPC, for that same reason. It's a non sequitur.

Saving die space also has no effect on power efficiency, beyond reducing the total transistor count. I'd be very surprised the x86-specific decoding logic makes up a significant area of your typical die. Maybe you'd make the processor 3% more efficient? Something like that?

I’m not sure how it works in the modern era. But back in the day there was also a performance cost when you had a mix of 16 bit code and 32 bit code in memory. I don’t know how it would be in 32 bit vs 64 bit.

And being able to get away with less RAM also improves battery life because keeping RAM refreshed uses energy - again a bigger factor on mobile.

The smaller the die, the less energy it uses. You can also use that space for efficiency cores.

Like I said, if the 32-bit stuff is getting used, that's an argument not remove the support.

> And being able to get away with less RAM also improves battery life because keeping RAM refreshed uses energy - again a bigger factor on mobile.

Memory allocation exists purely at the software level. The hardware doesn't understand whether a particular region has been allocated or not; the only difference between an allocated page and an unallocated one is that the former appears in the OS's VMM data structure as allocated (i.e. it's just more bits in memory). The power consumption of RAM scales with the total cells installed, not with how much the OS has decided is "in use".

So should Apple have also kept the PPC emulator around for Macs?

There's no such thing as "how little RAM you can get away with". A user is always better served by having more RAM. The limiting factor is the monetary budget, not the power budget. If a manufacturer puts less RAM on a computer it's only to cut costs, not as a power optimization. Compared to the CPU, RAM is free, power-wise. In fact, since optimizing for space is often in opposition to optimizing for time, having more RAM can save power by saving time spent computing things.

>So should Apple have also kept the PPC emulator around for Macs?

I'm not really interested in discussing what compatibility support should be included in any given OS. It's not the topic of discussion. The topic of discussion is whether cutting x86 support from x86-64 processors would result in significant power savings, and I maintain that it wouldn't. It would result in at best marginal power savings at the cost of a useful feature.

I'm confused, how is any of this related to "x86" and not the diverse array of third party hardware and software built with varying degrees of competence?

To be fair, usually the linux itself has hardware acceleration available but the browser vendors tend to disable gpu rendering except on controlled/known perfectly working combinations of OS/Hardware/Drivers and they have much less testing in Linux. In most case you can force enabling gpu rendering in about:config and try it out yourself and leave it unless you get recurring crashes.

All the Blink-based ones just work as long the proper libraries are installed and said libraries properly detect hardware support.

Incredible discipline. The Chrome graph in comparison was a mess.

If you manually go in and limit a modern Windows laptop's max performance to just under what the spec sheet indicates, it'll be fairly quiet and cool. In fact, most have a setting to do this, but it's rarely on by default because the manufacturers want to show off performance benchmarks. Of course, that's while also touting battery life that is not possible when in the mode that allows the best performance...

This doesn't cover other stupid battery life eaters like Modern Standy (it's still possible to disable it with registry tweaks! do it!), but if you don't need absolute max perf for renders or compiling or whatever, put your Windows or Linux laptop into "cool & quiet" mode and enjoy some decent extra battery.

It would also be really interesting to see what Apple Silicon could do under some Extreme OverClocking fun with sub-zero cooling or such. Would require a firmware & OS that allows more tuning and tweaking, so it's not going to happen anytime soon, but could actually be a nice brag for Apple it they did let it happen.

Looks like general purpose CPUs are on the losing train.

Maybe Intel should invent desktop+mobile OS and design bespoke chips for those.

I assume this is referring to the tweet from the launch of the M1 showing off that retaining and releasing an NSObject is like 3x faster. That's more of a general case of the ARM ISA being a better fit for modern software than x86, not some specific optimization for Apple's software.

x86 was designed long before desktops had multi-core processors and out-of-order execution, so for backwards compatibility reasons the architecture severely restricts how the processor is allowed to reorder memory operations. ARM was designed later, and requires software to explicitly request synchronization of memory operations where it's needed, which is much more performant and a closer match for the expectations of modern software, particularly post-C/C++11 (which have a weak memory model at the language level).

Reference counting operations are simple atomic increments and decrements, and when your software uses these operations heavily (like Apple's does), it can benefit significantly from running on hardware with a weak memory model.

It's not really even the ISA, mainly the implementation. Atomics on Apple cores are 3x faster than Intel (18 cycles back to back latency vs 6). AMD's atomics have 6 cycle latency.

  It seems if you want optimal performance and power efficiency, you need to own both hardware and software.

Here's an M4 Max running macOS running Parallels running Windows when compared to the fastest AMD laptop chip: https://browser.geekbench.com/v6/cpu/compare/13494385?baseli...

M4 Max is still faster even with 14 out of 16 possible cores being used. You can't chalk that up to optimizations anymore because Windows has no Apple Silicon optimizations.

Intel is busy fixing up their shit after what happened with their 13 & 14th gen CPU. Making imagine they making OS its called IntelOS and the only thing you can run is only by using Intel CPU

Or, contribute efficiency updates to popular open projects like firefox, chromium, etc...

Wouldn't it be easier for Intel to heavily modify the linus kernel instead of writing their own stack?

They could even go as far as writing the sleep utilities for laptops, or even their own window manager to take advantage of the specific mods in the ISA?

If it hadn't been killed, it may have become something interesting today.

it least on mobile platform apple advocate the other way with race to sleep - do calculation as fast as you can with powerful cores so that whole chip can go back to sleep earlier and more often take naps.

But when Apple says it, software devs actually listen.

The other aspect of it is that paid software is more prevalent in macOS land, and the prices are generally higher than on Windows. But the flip side of that is that user feedback is taken more seriously.

Modern MacBook pros have 2/3 (card reader and HDMI port), and they brought back my beloved MagSafe charging.

But yeah IMHO there's just no comparison. Unless you're one of those folks who simply cannot fucking stand Mac, it's just no contest.

I'm working in IT and I get all new machines for our company over my desk to check them, and I observed the exact same points as the OP.

The new machines are either fast and loud and hot and with poor battery life, or they are slow and "warm" and have moderate battery life.

But I had no business laptop yet, ARM, AMD, or Intel, which can even compete with the M1 Air, not to speak of the M3 Pro! Not to speak about all the issues with crappy Lenovo docks, etc.

It doesn’t matter if I install Linux or Windows. The funny point is that some of my colleagues have ordered a MacBook Air or Pro and use their Windows or Linux and a virtual machine via Parallels.

Think about it: Windows 11 or Linux in a VM is even faster, snappier, more silent, and has even longer battery life than these systems native on a business machine from Lenovo, HP, or Dell.

Well, your mileage may vary, but IMHO there is no alternative to a Mac nowadays, even if you want to use Linux or Windows.

With Nvidia Now I can even play games on it, though I wouldn't recommend it for any serious gamers.

And at the shop we are doing technology refreshes for the whole dev team upgrading them to M4s. I was asked if I wanted to upgrade my M1 Pro to an M4, and I said no. Mainly because I don't want to have to move my tooling over to a new machine, but I am not bottlenecked by anything on my current M1.

I need to point this out all the time these days it seems, but this opinion is only valid if all you use is a laptop and all you care about is single core perfomance.

The computing world is far bigger than just laptops.

Big music/3d design/video editing production suites etc still benefit much more from having workstation PCs with higher PCI bandwidth, more lanes for multiple SSDs and GPUs, and high level multicore processing performance which cannot be matched by Apple silicon.

For studio movies, render farms are usually Linux but I think many workstation tasks are done on Apple machines. Or is that no longer true?

Another bonus is that the MBP can drive high impedance headphones on the go, without needing an external audio interface.

It also helps that Logic was popular for awhile, and Pro Tools (the OG DAW) was a Mac thing, though Ableton overall is more popular these days.

On the video side Vegas Pro is used in a lot of production houses, and it does not run on Apple Silicon at all.

Add to that the fact that most of the audio interfaces were firewire and plug and play on mac and a real struggle on windows. With windows you also had to deal with ASIO, and once you picked your audio interface it has to be used for both inputs and outputs (still to this day) forcing you to compound interfaces with workarounds like Asio4All if you wanted to use different interfaces, while Mac os just lets you pick different interfaces for input and output

Linux had very interesting projects, unfortunately music production relies on a lot of expensive audio plugins that a lot of time come in installers and are a pain in the butt to use through proton/wine, when it's possible at all. That means that doing music production on Linux means possibly not using plugins you paid and not finding alternatives to them. It's a shame because I'd love to be able to only use Linux

With Apple removing Firewire support this Fall, and so many devices still plugging along in so many studios, I wonder what's going to happen this fall.

When I was at music college doing production courses, they exclusively taught Cubase on windows.

Also Protools was available on Windows from 1997 and was used in many PC based studios.

You're right about protools on Windows. I got confused about protools not requiring the use of their own interfaces

I thought so too, but I see a lot more people using non-Apple systems for music production than I expected. I don't know whether I was too influenced by Apple's marketing (computers for creators) or something has changed.

AMD kind of has, the "Max 395+" is (within 5% margin or so) pretty close to M4 Pro, on both performance and energy use. (it's in the 'Framework Desktop', for example, but not in their laptop lineup yet)

AMD/Intel hasn't surpassed Apple yet (there's no answer for the M4 Max / M3 Ultra, without exploding the energy use on the AMD/Intel side), but AMD does at least have a comparable and competitive offering.

That said Hardware Canucks did a review of the 395 in a mobile form factor (Asus ROG Flow F13) with TDP at 70w (lower than the max 120w TDP you see in desktop reviews). This lower-than-max TDP also gets you closer to the perf/watt sweet spot.

The M4 Pro scores slightly higher in Cinebench R24 despite being 10P+4E vs a full 16P cores on the 395 all while using something like a 30% less power. M4 Pro scores nearly 35% higher than the single-core R24 benchmark too. 395 GPU performance is than M4 Pro in productivity software. More specifically, they trade blows based on which is more optimized in a particular app, but AMD GPUs have way more optimizations in general and gaming should be much better with an x86 + AMD GPU vs Rosetta 2 + GPU translation layers + Wine/crossover.

M4 Pro gets around 50% better battery life for tasks like web browsing when accounting for battery size differences and more than double the battery life per watt/hr when doing something simple like playing a video. Battery life under full load is a bit better for the 395, but doing the math, this definitely involves the 395 throttling significantly down from it's 70w TDP.

Some Chinese companies have also announced laptops with it coming out soon.

Rule of the thumb is roughly 15% advantage to distribute between power and performance there.

Catching up while remaining on older nodes is no joke.

I am usually the one doing it on HN. But it is still not common knowledge after we went from M1 to M4.

And this thread S/N ratio is already 10 times better than most other Apple Silicon discussions.

AMD's Max 395+ is N4, or 5nm Class Product.

The Apple M4 is N3 or 3nm Class product.

https://frame.work/laptop16?tab=whats-new

Second, the x86 platform has a lot of legacy, and each operation on x86 is translated from an x86 instruction into RISC-like micro-ops. This is an inherent penalty that Apple doesn't have pay, and it is also why Rosetta 2 can achieve "near native" x86 performance; both platform translate the x86 instructions.

Third, there are some architectural differences even if the instruction decoding steps are removed from the discussion. Apple Silicon has a huge out-of-order buffer, and it's 8-wide vs x86 4-wide. From there, the actual logic is different, the design is different, and the packaging is different. AMD's Ryzen AI Max 300 series does get close to Apple by using many of the same techniques like unified memory and tossing everything onto the package, where it does lose is due to all of the other differences.

In the end, if people want crazy efficiency Apple is a great answer and delivers solid performance. If people want the absolute highest performance, then something like Ryzen Threadripper, EPYC, or even the higher-end consumer AMD chips are great choices.

1) Apple Silicon outperforms all laptop CPUs in the same power envelope on 1T on industry-standard tests: it's not predominantly due to "optimizing their software stack". SPECint, SPECfp, Geekbench, Cinebench, etc. all show major improvements.

2) x86 also heavily relies on micro-ops to greatly improve performance. This is not a "penalty" in any sense.

3) x86 is now six-wide, eight-wide, or nine-wide (with asterisks) for decode width on all major Intel & AMD cores. The myth of x86 being stuck on four-wide has been long disproven.

4) Large buffers, L1, L2, L3, caches, etc. are not exclusive to any CPU microarchitecture. Anyone can increase them—the question is, how much does your core benefit from larger cache features?

5) Ryzen AI Max 300 (Strix Halo) gets nowhere near Apple on 1T perf / W and still loses on 1T perf. Strix Halo uses slower CPUs versus the beastly 9950X below:

Fanless iPad M4 P-core SPEC2017 int, fp, geomean: 10.61, 15.58, 12.85 AMD 9950X (Zen5) SPEC2017 int, fp, geomean: 10.14, 15.18, 12.41 Intel 285K (Lion Cove) SPEC2017 int, fp, geomean: 9.81, 12.44, 11.05

Source: https://youtu.be/2jEdpCMD5E8?t=185, https://youtu.be/ymoiWv9BF7Q?t=670

The 9950X & 285K eat 20W+ per core for that 1T perf; the M4 uses ~7W. Apple has a node advantage, but no node on Earth gives you 50% less power.

There is no contest.

2. X86 micro-ops vs ARM decode are not equivalent. X86’s variable length instructions make the whole process far more complicated than it is on something like ARM. This is a penalty due to legacy design.

3. The OP was talking about M1. AFAIK, M4 is now 10-wide, and most x86 is 6-wide (Ryzen 5 does some weird stuff). X86 was 4-wide at the time of M1’s introduction.

4. M1 has over 600 reorder buffer registers… it’s significantly larger than competitors.

5. Close relative to x86 competitors.

And? Are you saying neither Intel nor AMD engineers were able to determine that this was a bottleneck worth chasing? The point was, anybody could add more cache, rename, reorder or whatever buffers they wanted to... it's not Apple secret-sauce.

If all the competition knew they were leaving all this performance/efficiency on the table despite there being a relatively simple fix, that's on them. They got overtaken by a competitor with a better offering.

If all the competition didn't realize they were leaving all this performance/efficiency on the table despite there being a relatively simple fix, that's also on them. They got overtaken by a competitor with better offering AND more effective engineers.

From the AMD side it was 4 wide until Zen 5. And now it's still 4 wide, but there is a separate 4-wide decoder for each thread. The micro-op cache can deliver a lot of pre-decoded instructions so the issue width is (I dunno) wider but the decode width is still 4.

It's an energy penalty, even if wall clock time improves.

3. The claim was never "stuck on 4-wide", but that going wider would incur significant penalties which is the case. AMD uses two 4-wide encoders and pays a big penalty in complexity trying to keep them coherent and occupied. Intel went 6-wide for Golden Cove which is infamous for being the largest and most power-hungry x86 design in a couple decades. This seems to prove the 4-wide people right.

4. This is only partially true. The ISA impacts which designs make sense which then impacts cache size. uop cache can affect L1 I-cache size. Page size and cache line size also affect L1 cache sizes. Target clockspeeds and cache latency also affect which cache sizes are viable.

https://dougallj.github.io/applecpu/firestorm.html

Can we please stop with this myth? Every superscalar processor is doing the exact same thing, converting the ISA into the µops (which may involve fission or fusion) that are actually serviced by the execution units. It doesn't matter if the ISA is x86 or ARM or RISC-V--it's a feature of the superscalar architecture, not the ISA itself.

The only reason that this canard keeps coming out is because the RISC advocates thought that superscalar was impossible to implement for a CISC architecture and x86 proved them wrong, and so instead they pretend that it's only because x86 somehow cheats and converts itself to RISC internally.

Which hasn't even been the case anymore for several years now. Some µOPs in modern x86-64 cores combine memory access with arithmetic operations, making them decidedly non-RISC.

ARM processors ALSO decode instructions to micro-ops. And Apple chips do too. Pretty much a draw. The first stage in the execution pipelines of all modern processors is a a decode stage.

* Apple has had decades optimizing its software and hardware stacks to the demands of its majority users, whereas Intel and AMD have to optimize for a much broader scope of use cases.

* Apple was willing to throw out legacy support on a regular basis. Intel and AMD, by comparison, are still expected to run code written for DOS or specific extensions in major Enterprises, which adds to complexity and cost

* The “standard” of x86 (and demand for newly-bolted-on extensions) means effort into optimizations for efficiency or performance meet diminishing returns fairly quickly. The maturity of the platform also means the “easy” gains are long gone/already done, and so it’s a matter of edge cases and smaller tweaks rather than comprehensive redesigns.

* Software in x86 world is not optimized, broadly, because it doesn’t have to be. The demoscene shows what can be achieved in tight performance envelopes, but software companies have never had reason to optimize code or performance when next year has always promised more cores or more GHz.

It boils down to comparing two different products and asking why they can’t be the same. Apple’s hardware is purpose-built for its userbase, operating systems, and software; x86 is not, and never has been. Those of us who remember the 80s and 90s of SPARC/POWER/Itanium/etc recall that specialty designs often performed better than generalist ones in their specialties, but lacked compatibility as a result.

The Apple ARM vs Intel/AMD x86 is the same thing.

Apple also has a particular advantage in owning the os and having the ability to force independent developers to upgrade their software, which make incompatible updates (including perf optimizations) possible.

The price of Apple’s approach is that 3p developers have to dance to Apple’s tune. And that’s a tough road, as evidenced by the small set of really successful companies which have bet the farm on Apple.

They could also just sit down with Microsoft and say "Right, we're going to go in an entirely different direction, and provide you with something absolutely mind-blowing, but we're going to have to do software emulation for backward compatibility and that will suck for a while until things get recompiled, or it'll suck forever if they never do".

Apple did this twice in the last 20 years - once on the move from PowerPC chips to Intel, and again from Intel to Apple Silicon.

If Microsoft and enough large OEMs (Dell, etc.), thought there was enough juice in the new proposed architecture to cause a major redevelopment of everything from mobile to data centre level compute, they'd line right up, because they know that if you can significantly reduce the amount of power consumption while smashing benchmarks, there are going to long, long wait times for that hardware and software, and its pay day for everyone.

We now know so much more about processor design, instruction set and compiler design than we did when the x86 was shaping up, it seems obvious to me that:

1. RISC is a proven entity worth investing in

2. SoC & SiP is a proven entity worth investing in

3. Customers love better power/performance curves at every level from the device in their pocket to the racks in data centres

4. Intel is in real trouble if they are seriously considering the US government owning actual equity, albeit proposed as non-voting, non-controlling

Intel can keep the x86 line around if they want, but their R&D needs to be chasing where the market is heading - and fast - while bringing the rest of the chain along with them.

For an example of why this doesnt work, see 'Intel Itanium'.

The alternative is death - they do nothing, they're going to die.

Which option do you think they should take?

Thats a subjective opinion. Plenty of people still value higher power multi core chips over apple silicon, because they are still better at doing real work. I dont think they need to go in a new direction personally, but I was just showing an example of why your provided solution is not a silver bullet.

Each time they had a pretty good emulation story to keep most stuff (certainly popular stuff) working through a multi-year transition period.

IMO, this is better then carrying around 40 years of cruft.

A new major version of macOS comes out every year. The oldest Mac still supported by the upcoming macOS 26 is from 2019.

"oh a post about Apple, let me come in and share my hatred for Apple again by outright lying!"

As stated already, macOS 26 runs on the M1 and even the 2019 Macbook Pro. So i think i know where you got the "3 new versions" figure, and it's a dark and smelly place.

However My parents 2017 Macbook pro can only upgrade to Ventura, which is a 2022 release. 5 years and that $2.5k baby was obselete. However rude you are about your defense of Apple, 5-6 years until software starts being unable to install is pretty shitty. I use 30 year old apps daily on windows with no issue.

Looks like defending Apple is the smelly place to be judging by your tone and condescending snark.

Meanwhile, in [Windows land], > Microsoft has provided the minimum and feature-specific device specifications required for upgrading to Windows 11. A number of devices will meet these requirements, however devices with legacy BIOS or without a Trusted Platform Module (TPM 2.0) are not compatible for the upgrade.

> Microsoft also provided a full list of supported Intel processors; however this loosely translates to compatibility with Intel's 8th-generation processors and newer, meaning devices produced within the last 6-7 years have a high chance of being compatible.

Sure looks like Apple's support of old machines is in line with Windows here.

[Windows land] https://www.rm.com/blog/2024/may/a-surprising-number-of-pcs-...

I don't really know why windows is so very very bad, I just assume it has a lot to do with all the compatibility. If that's the case, then I prefer the Apple approach.

This is false.

But as you mention - they've at multiple times changed the underlying architecture, which surely would render å large part of prior optimizations obsolete?

> Software in x86 world is not optimized, broadly, because it doesn’t have to be.

Do ARM software need optimization more than x86?

If Windows-World software developers could one day announce that they will only support Intel Gen 14 or later (and not bother with AMD at all), and only support the latest and greatest NVidia GPUs (and only GPUs that cost $900 or more), I'm pretty sure they would optimize their code differently, and would sometimes get dramatic performance improvements.

It's not so much that ARM needs optimizations more, but that x86 software can't practically be broadly optimized.