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Comment by allie1 | Hacker News Reader

The x86 ecosystem is far superior to Apple Silicon, and that is not going away any time soon.

Macs have one big advantage - efficiency, which translates to long battery life and more importantly for me personally - NOT OVERHEATING.

However, porting software to apple silicon results in inefficiencies, and for developers it gets a bit trickier.

I have a M1 Max with 65GB ram and I love it, but the moment Intel comes out with chip that doesn't overheat and is as performant, I'll be buying an Intel based laptop (granted, I will have to wait for longer).

In a perfect world, Apple would get back to offering Intel as a CPU option when Intel comes back to the leading edge. You'd get the Mac OS, x86 and performance in a well built laptop - a dream!

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> chip that doesn't overheat and is as performant

Does it have to be Intel, or would you consider AMD?

Yes, if you look back even just to Zen / Zen+ laptop chips, they were not impressive, but Zen 2 and newer based chips (Ryzen 4000 or higher) are performant, efficient, and do not overheat. There are some crazy 7045HX chips that are basically desktop chips that you wouldn't want in your laptop, but the 7040HS line is exactly what you were waiting for (as well as the 6000U and 6000HS line). Unless you need Intel over AMD for some reason?

This is helpful, thank you. I prefer Intel due to personal biases, but I will research AMD.

Overheating is entirely down to the profiles the manufacturers use. Intel processors can be efficient, but usually they get clocked to the moon on desktop. Laptops are so all over the place it's impossible to judge them either :/

I haven't tried limiting clock speeds to keep the laptop cool, and it seems a bit crazy investment to buy a laptop to try that, but I do have an old MBP with Intel that I can test this with.

You won't see power efficiency and temps comparable to apple silicon on the Intel MBPs, being 14nm, though you can probably get a nice marginal improvement like giving up 10% performance for 20% less power draw. The newer chips from AMD and Intel are comparably efficient to apple silicon with a restrictive power envelope.

AMD's 5nm chips outperform the M1 and M2, although they are not as power efficient, they have a very low TDP, run cool and idle at basically nothing.

Given them another node shrink and they'll be even better.

What inefficiency are you talking about? Graviton instances in aws run general software better than x86.

I was referring to personal computer usage. Yes, usage specific chips can be a better option, but as far as general processing/usage is concerned, I'd take x86 over Apple Silicon any day of the week.

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