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Comment by mojuba | Hacker News Reader

> Apple has a max-efficiency design that's excellent for personal computing. Intel/AMD have aging max-performance designs that do beat Apple at absolute peak...

Can you explain then, how come switching from Intel MBP to Apple Silicon MBP feels like literally everything is 3x faster, the laptop barely heats up at peak load, and you never hear the fans? Going back to my Intel MBP is like going back to stone age computing.

In other words if Intel is so good, why is it... so bad? I genuinely don't understand. Keep in mind though, I'm not comparing an Intel gaming computer to a laptop, let's compare oranges to oranges.

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If you take a peak-performance-optimized design (the Intel CPU) and throttle it down to low power levels, it will be slower than a design optimized for low power (the Apple CPU).

"let's compare oranges to oranges"

That's impossible because Apple has bought up most of TSMC's 3nm production capacity. You could try to approximate by comparing Apple M4 Max against NVIDIA B300 but that'll be a very one-sided win for NVIDIA.

> That's impossible because Apple has bought up most of TSMC's 3nm production capacity. You could try to approximate by comparing Apple M4 Max against NVIDIA B300 but that'll be a very one-sided win for NVIDIA.

Have you not heard that Intel's Lunar Lake is made on the same TSMC 3nm process as Apple's M3? It's not at all "impossible" to make a fair and relevant comparison here.

> Can you explain then, how come switching from Intel MBP to Apple Silicon MBP feels like literally everything is 3x faster, the laptop barely heats up at peak load, and you never hear the fans? Going back to my Intel MBP is like going back to stone age computing.

My understanding of it is that Apple Silicon's very very long instruction pipeline plays well with how the software stack in MacOS is written and compiled first and foremost.

Similarly that the same applications take less RAM in MacOS than even in Linux often even because at the OS level stuff like garbage collection are better integrated.

I did not say "Intel is so good". I said "x86 peak single-thread performance is just a hair better than Apple M-series peak".

Pretty much everything else about the M-series parts is better. In particular, Apple's uncore is amazing (partly because it's a lot newer design) and you really notice that in terms of power management.

Is the Intel MacBook very old?

Is it possible that your workloads are bound by something other than single-threaded compute performance? Memory? Drive speed?

Is it possible that Apple did a better job tuning their OS for their hardware, than for Intel’s?

it all comes down to thermal budget of something as thin as MBP.

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