Comment by ceeplusplus | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ceeplusplus | Hacker News Reader

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That average is over the entire benchmarking suite, including single thread tests and when tests are loading from disk or otherwise not fully saturating the CPU. Some of those benchmarks in that power consumption number are GPU only!

Take a look at the AOM AV1 power consumption graph (https://openbenchmarking.org/result/2208044-NE-6850U700026&s...), it clearly displays huge drops when the test stops running. The CPU is turboing to 30 watts in 75% of the run.

If you use the 15W hard cap performance numbers (low power mode), performance drops 20-40%.

> Apple also exceeds the stated tdp during peaks as well but we don't have that information atm

We actually do. Notebookcheck recorded 20W usage on a peak MT load (https://www.notebookcheck.net/Apple-MacBook-Air-M2-Entry-Rev...). The MBA is fanless so it's physically impossible for it to substantially exceed that amount without frying your lap.

> And remember there's a 14% perf gap between the two

Like I said, power is not equal at all.

> x86 isn't behind in performance and that you're not making sacrifices in that department to maintain software compatibility with the x86 ecosystem

Comparing the lowest end chip from one vendor to the highest end chip from another is not exactly a great look. Especially when the Arm chip is basically matching the x86 one while having only a few years of software optimization work.

I do think M2 is more power efficient, but it seems close enough to me. The Thinkpad in real usecase testing has very good battery life, 15 hours etc doing regular work. I just don't have the perspective that the fact it can scale up in power should be held against it. It's pretty typical when you're doing some super computationally expensive processing to be plugged while it's the casual emails etc that has to have great battery life.

> Comparing the lowest end chip from one vendor to the highest end chip from another is not exactly a great look.

Is it anyone else's fault that Apple only has one sku. The M2 is a 20 billion transistor chip while the Rembrandt is a 13 billion transistor chip. I'd argue that the M2 is higher end one. The laptops MBA/Thinkpad compared are the same price.

> Especially when the Arm chip is basically matching the x86 one while having only a few years of software optimization work.

So we agree it matches lol? That's what I was arguing for. Nowhere did I say Apple sucks. I default to using Apple products and have been for almost all my life. I was just trying to make a case that x86 is good enough too hardware wise.

One could argue that the Ryzen's biggest pitfall is that it hasn't adopted a big.LITTLE configuration yet. Alder Lake keeps it's thirsty TDPs while staying relatively respectful of your temps and battery life. It's not quite as granular as Apple's core clusters, but the work with Thread Director is a promising start. Seeing AMD push heterogeneous systems so far down the roadmap virtually guarantees that they won't get Apple-level power efficiency for a while.

On the bright side, AMD has carte-blanche to design whatever they want. Not only can they one-up Intel by implementing core clusters, but they could also one-up Apple by adding power management per-logical-core, or some weird chiplet optimizations. The sky is the limit, really.

Alder lake is much worse temp wise. Look at the new Dell XPS design. They literally had to remove the F keys to make room for additional heatsink to get the newer Alder lake CPUs to work in a reasonable way.

Those Dell XPS are no better than an Intel Macbook, they're designed by people who can't put function before form and consistently screw up their hardware design enough to avoid like the plague. I'm not the least bit surprised they didn't pick the right chip for the job, two years ago it was Dell sending out emails to XPS owners warning them not to leave it asleep in a bag for risk of permanent damage...

I've tried a few Alder Lake laptops now (and daily-drive a 12700k desktop), and I don't really have any complaints about the thermals. Gaming, music production, video editing, none of it can seem to push the CPU past 40c under extended load. It's a solid chip that stands toe-to-toe with it's contemporaries, and I reckon it's going to get scarily good once Intel transitions it from 10nm++ to 5nm.

I agree but that still doesn't invalidate my point. They had to significantly overhaul the thermal system for alder lake. I validating the point that it uses less power then the prior Intel gens.

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