Apple will be ahead, but the gap will not widen.
[0] https://www.notebookcheck.net/AMD-Ryzen-7-6800U-Efficiency-R...
Not an apple zealot by any means, but I think you shouldn’t be so quick to dismiss.
For my own part I’m not sure how to measure performance per watt given all the functional units on die.
Ryzen is only 6% behind for multi-core PPW, but The M1 appears to still have a huge advantage in single-core PPW.
I have a half dozen thoughts on this, but the foremost is;
Apple keeping memory on chip, is likely providing a huge memory latency advantage, (1) as well as some power benefits. It would not surprise me if this is a large part of (if not the majority) of the advantage here outside of the bigger decoder.
Think about a single threaded vs multithreaded benchmark; In the case of ST, there's only one thread the prefetcher can deal with, that one thread is going to be waiting for data. In the case of MT, there's a much greater likelyhood that you'll have multiple threads making memory requests, and the latency can be amortized by having the threads do other work (i.e. Thread 1 can start working on data it got back while thread 2's request is already in-flight from controller to DRAM.)
This is one of those moments I miss David Kanter (RealWorldTech, [0]) doing CPU arch breakdowns.
(1) - Back in the day, one of the 'better' things you could do for a SDRAM P3/Athlon/Duron system, especially if you were replacing all modules for an upgrade anyway, was to hunt for CL2 memory.
How? It's the same LPDDR5 everyone else is using and it's on package not on "chip". The trace length has a negligible impact on latency.
Uhm, that is not true. If that was true, then your typical motherboard kept slots where they were 10 years ago, but they're getting closer to combat the increase in latency in other places. This is why HEDT motherboards have such layouts.
But just getting it close is not enough: M1 has higher memory latency than AMD and Intel SKUs.
They dug themselves out with the Core 2 Duo.
There remains a nonzero chance Intel digs themselves out of the hole again.
I'm strongly considering their stock.
I think it’s way easier to dig yourself out of a whole by picking up a previous architecture and updating it (ditching the Pentium 4 and using the 3 as the basis for the Core architecture) than it is by regaining manufacturing lead, especially when there’s only one company that’s able to do it these days. Lots of companies are able to make compelling architectures with different instruction sets. Actual chip making, however, is TSCM.
How Intel lost their lead is probably the greatest business case to be studied in our industry’s recent history.