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A comment on Completely Silent Computer. Parent comment

Re:Completely Silent Computer by zelos on Wednesday May 16, 2018 @11:08AM (#17083002)
It does seem like something is missing in the comparison. High end x86 CPUs draw something like 30W idle, which would drain an iPhone X's battery in minutes. Do Apple/Arm really have some magic technology that makes their CPUs orders of magnitude more power efficient?

Geekbench always seems like an odd benchmark - the variability between runs alone is kind of odd. If I could run a compiler on an iPhone, for example, would I really see similar performance to my MBP?

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Re:Completely Silent Computer by Xylakant on Wednesday May 16, 2018 @11:13AM (#17083042)
The CPUs in MacBooks are mobile CPUs that certainly don’t draw 30W idle. You’d drain the battery faster than you can charge it :)
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Re:Completely Silent Computer by mrguyorama on Wednesday May 16, 2018 @12:11PM (#17083518)
One thing to note, x86 is known for being spectacularly inefficient for mobile workloads. It's not magic that makes an ARM CPU more efficient, it's just different design considerations. For an example of this, check out the Intel Atom line of processors[0] which were mostly x86 processors but designed to be mobile and power sipping. Whether they were successful at that, or in terms of performance, I'm not sure. But they get down to single digit TDP, which is how many watts of power you can expect one to use while under load.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Atom

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