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Apple is ridiculously far ahead of the competition in terms of performance per watt.

Not insurmountably, though. Performance-per-watt wise, their GPUs seem to be a full generation behind Nvidia's options. A laptop-spec 3080 regularly beats the M2 Ultra at the same wattage, which is a bit of a head-scratcher considering the node disparity.

It looks like Apple's biggest lead is the TSMC node advantage and their ARM license. And they're not the only ones with access to TSMC fabs and ARM specifications...

> at the same wattage

That max wattage of the 3080 laptop variant (just the GPU) is ~5x of Apple's CPU and GPU combined.

I don't think that's quite right: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT213100

For reference, I'm using OpenCL and raster benchmarks from Blender to draw my comparison. Seems like the fairest common ground: https://browser.geekbench.com/opencl-benchmarks https://opendata.blender.org/benchmarks/query/?group_by=devi...

Apple Silicon made a big splash because they were the first on TSMC 5nm and got compared to AMD on TSMC 7nm. Now that we've seen 5nm Ryzen it's basically the same, AMD uses a somewhat higher max TDP and correspondingly gets higher multi-thread performance.

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