I can't wait to see benchmarks on these chips.
Lots of people are saying that Apple chips are good only because they have the node advantage. Let's see what they can do within the same power envelope now.
Lots of people are saying that Apple chips are good only because they have the node advantage. Let's see what they can do within the same power envelope now.
But real performance improvements post M1 didn't really match expectations. IMO the expectations Apple stated/implied in their usual marketing incantations are partly to blame, but they were the ones pumping the hype, so it's completely fair to charge them for that.
Compute performance improvements of ~30% are OK and in line with everybody else, meaning they are dealing with the same reality as other companies, hence the "let down"
https://wccftech.com/apple-m2-ultra-soc-isnt-faster-than-amd...
Also, there's benchmarks like these:
https://owehrens.com/whisper-nvidia-rtx-4090-vs-m1pro-with-m...
Since power consumption vs performance is non-linear it's possible that the Intel+Nvidia combo would have roughly similar efficiency as M2 at lower wattage, although it certainly won't beat the M2 at 90 watts.
Depending on what you're doing, modern AMD chips are very close to M series chips under load (specifically efficiency). The biggest issue is idle power is still higher. My amd framework (7840u) takes between 5-10watts idle unless I use something like the xtu tuner.
Need to purchase a new business laptop soon
This is with a 14nm chip, one would think the newer systems could hopefully do at least this well.
In the modern era, AMD chips are actually known for running hotter for quite a number of reasons (much thicker IHS on AM5, stacked v-cache on X3D, boost algorithm deliberately saturating thermals, etc), even though the intel chips pull more power.
cpus are not an ideal thermal system and do have their own internal thermal resistance. a 7800X3D runs hotter than a 7700X at equivalent (limited) PPT, which runs hotter than a 13900K at the equivalent (limited) PPT, because the thermal resistance is higher. these are objectively measurable things!
Also, generally, surface area is a component of thermal intensity as well and if you take the same flux and spread it out over more surface area you will get a lower temperature too. A threadripper putting out 250W does so with less thermal intensity than a 7800X3D putting out 250W and will run at a lower temperature too.
like yes, you are correctly describing the measurements in which these cpus are not the same thing, but then making the incorrect leap that "because in a spherical-cow world they would be equal" that these cpus are equivalent in these metrics in real life, which they are not. different cpus have different thermal resistances, and AMD's is generally higher right now because of the decision to go with a thicker IHS (to maintain cooler compatibility) and the move towards stacking (more silicon in the way = more thermal resistance).
and again, don't pretend this is some absurd or unknown concept, we literally spent years and years with amd fans making memes about "intel toothpaste"... thermals and wattage dissipated are not the same thing. you can have a great, efficient product with terrible thermal resistance, there have been a number of them!
it's just that AMD isn't on the top this time, so everyone pretends not to get it... or volunteers a bunch of theoretical reasons it doesn't matter... or ...
just like "thermal watts aren't the same thing as electrical watts!" etc
Btw as someone with a skylake laptop that also used to sip power, I suspect there's been a mild across the board power increase especially as newer chips clock much higher. My ryzen 7 iirc goes till 5.1ghz and is noticeably faster (i'm at 392 tabs in edge right now) than my skylake. I suspect your older laptop wouldn't clock so high, and a 3ghz limited intel/amd would have great battery.
I highly recommend going through some youtube battery life videos and looking up notebook check reviews for whatever you're planning to buy/compare.
As far as I can tell, it is not enabling LCD panel self-refresh. This may be where the extra idle power is going with screen on? If you think about it, it's a pretty expensive behavior to constantly read framebuffer content out of system RAM at 60 Hz.
AMD is already significantly faster than M series, and has been so for a long time. Efficiency is the only place Apple still has an advantage
So far it is looking OK. In single core, it handily beats a 7900X3D at a fraction of the power draw.
check e.g those
https://www.cpubenchmark.net/laptop.html
AMD and Intel beat Apple hard in perf and price benchmarks.
I just showed you that Apple is equal or better in terms of single core performance. This thread is a bunch of childish fanboy nonsense, attaching egos to some brand of CPU manufacturer and ignoring actual benchmarks.
Personally I don't care about $20 price differences. On a developer salary who gives a shit about price? I own Apple, Intel, and AMD cpus. They're all good.
So, just because you used one metric, then I shouldnt look at the other metrics?
So how should I understand this other ranking from the website that you've provided? https://www.cpubenchmark.net/laptop.html
Apple beats them on single-core ratings. You can see the single-core rating if you click on one of those results.
At that level its competing on efficiency and capped by power consumption. It can't reach 5 GHz with only 80 watts for all cores. Running at 3.5 GHz. The Intel and AMD CPUs need hundreds of watts and reach 5 GHz+. It's a tradeoff for efficiency. Different design decisions. Different tradeoffs. Not exactly competing in the same market segments.
Mac Pro is often used for video editing. The M2 Ultra has hardware acceleration for video encoding/decoding that would need a separate accelerator card on Intel or AMD to match: "M2 Ultra can support up to 22 streams of 8K ProRes 422 video playback"
It cannot be compared perfectly, but you can try to estimate its perf/$
I'm not saying this will be easy, but imagine if the whole laptop was e.g 10k usd instead of 4-5k, then you'd instantly feel that something is expensive
Hardly.
I don't see how one would be able to identify and normalize all the required variables, e.g. median life expectancy, average performance across metrics per watt, average power usage, residual value, etc.
For instance, I can sell my 2017 MacBook Pro for roughly twice as much as my 2017 Thinkpad, which has better specs. How do you factor that?
I wouldn't because it makes no sense. Occurance of great deals aint relevant here, imo. Why would I care that customers do crazy stuff on 2nd hand market?
>I don't see how one would be able to identify and normalize all the required variables, e.g. median life expectancy, average performance across metrics per watt, average power usage, residual value, etc.
How about building system for similar price to Macbook and comparing their performance?
It, of course won't be ideal, fair, whatever, but ain't it what gamers do? They find PC configurations and check how games run on them.
For 1) my fastest iron is i9-13700KS and Apple M2. They are very close. My Zen 3 is great and is notably more power efficient, but I'll evaluate 14700KS-Zen 5-M3 when possible.
ADD: because of winter I'm loving my i9-13700KS (not kidding, my office would be freezing without it), but come summer I'll care about efficiency.
https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/cpus/apple-m3-cpu...
Single core performance is only useful for artificial benchmarks. And even there Apples lead is less than 2%.
That is nonsense that none of the CPU competitors would agree with. In most applications single core performance matters very much. Not every algorithm can be multi threaded and there is an unavoidable overhead with those that can be multi threaded. Only some parts of some applications can be multi threaded.
For example, a 20 core 500 MHz CPU is much less capable and responsive for real world usage than a 5 core 2 GHz CPU, despite having the same instruction count per cycle.
A 100 core 100 Mhz CPU would take forever to boot up and feel unusably slow.
Of course, it also has a very low performance-per-watt, comparatively speaking.
The higher memory bandwidth doesn't do anything for ST perf.
It has the highest performance per Watt.
Shouldn't AMD and Intel have an expertise that ideally would take decades and billions to be reached?
A program built for an intel and amd cpu 30 years ago runs today. That’s not true of M series.
Even without that, all modern chips translate the ISA into internal ops, and that translation take such a miniscule fraction of chip area that ISA in 2024 has minimal effect on power and performance.
This was the team that did the Digital Alpha & StrongARM.
As always "the overnight success were years in the making".
This was back in 1990.
Before they switched to Intel x86, they were also involved in PowerPC, together with IBM and Motorola.
So they are not coming from nowhere by any means.
With that said the competition is gaining, a couple hope to match Perf and perf/watt of the M3. Some even mention the M3 pro. None mention the M3 max.
I would definitely like to see if the x86 industry could figure out how to include more channels while also not requiring 6-8 DIMMS to take advantage of it, like Thread Ripper.
Something like dual channel on a single DIMM?
Intel & AMD are leaving too much performance and profit on the table not to do so eventually; IMO it's more a matter of when rather than if.
I have to hand it to Apple, it's bold that they have on-package RAM that's so wide. (And then doubling and quadrupling whole core complex with tiling is a stunning move; Pro and Max.) Apple shipped a huge range at all once: a very capable mobile chip to a very beastly workstation grade chip.
Intel's most notable attempt to me was Lakefield (2019), a Mobile Internet Device (MID) class (sub-laptop) chip that I quite liked. The 1+4 architecture wasnt very fast and it was a bit more power intense than the Snapdragons of the day that it had a modest-to-significsnt lead over. But I loved that it was like this tiny tiny package that you basically just had to add power to, and the on-package LPDDR4X-4266 was a very speedy offering for 2019.
Intel's upcoming Lunar Lake mobile was shown in January, rocking tiled (doesn't look like a stacked/3D Foveros setup) on package ram. https://www.anandtech.com/show/21219/ces-2024-intel-briefly-...
But both AMD and Intel already have big on-package ram cores. Intel's been shipping a "Max" Sapphire Rapids with 64GB HBM2e for a year (https://www.tomshardware.com/news/intel-launches-sapphire-ra...). Like Apple's Ultra, it's a quad-tile with each CPU having a it's own HBMe stack. AMD's MI300A is basically a GPU where some of the tiles are instead CPUs but it too has 8 stacks of HBM3.
I keep asking myself how & when & where is on-package ram going to arrive in. But there's already significant HBM presence in big cores! It didn't seem to make an huge difference for Sapphire Rapids; some help but unless one uses the expensive accelerators well there s probably not enough core to use it. Meanwhile MI300 is only just happening & more API focused. We have yet for on package ram to really be meaningful & available & making a difference like it did for Apple.
But as your post says, it feels like an inevitability. Someone's gonna make a core that can do more or be better by having lower powered faster local ram.
Part of my suspicion is that the market is resisting de-segmentation. The real issue is that Apple used on package ram to add many channels. Not of slow wise HBM memory, but mamy channels of DDR ram. These companies don't actually want to compete on throughout; they want throughput to be associated with $10k exotic chips. They are lament to build higher bandwidth more-channel consumer cores.
That starts to change some next year with AMD's Strix Halo, a big APU with quad-channel ram. There's no on-package ram as far as I've heard, but once you start having that much board real estate & energy going to ram, it sure would be nice to get even more performance for less power & much less space.
Damn I love on package setups. 2024 doesn't seem likely to offer much new or exciting, but 2025 has some possible signs for hope.
you can't really do that, DDR5 has a concept called "pseudo-channels" where a normal 64b channel can be broken down into 2x32 smaller ones, which improves parallel efficiency somewhat (now you can have 2 requests in-flight at the same time). But mostly bandwidth is down to the number of pins and how much data you can physically push down them, chopping the same pins into smaller channels doesn't help, other than letting you eliminate some inefficiency/overhead.
however, this is essentially the goal behind strix point/strix halo - narrower memory buses (compared to apple) with cache to improve the effective bandwidth. Just like in GPUs, this allows you to use fewer channels to get to the same bandwidth, which means less actual data movement. The downside is, of course, less "raw" bandwidth, if your workload is not cacheable.
basically my rough expectation is that it's going to be more expensive than apple silicon, and still probably not actually beat on power, but will allow you to do workstation laptops with 512GB or 1TB of unified memory, which is also something the apple stuff cannot do. They are different products, apple is targeting people who want a powerful ultrabook, amd is targeting people who want a mobile threadripper for actual work tasks (metrology is one example).