Re:Apple Silicon M1 – What to Expect, Based on A14
by modeless on Tuesday November 10, 2020 @05:38PM
(#25053027)
Perf/watt matters even if you don't care about power consumption at all, because heat dissipation is usually the limiting factor for sustained performance. Higher perf/watt means higher perf for any given amount of cooling.
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Re:Apple Silicon M1 – What to Expect, Based on A14
by cromwellian on Tuesday November 10, 2020 @05:55PM
(#25053196)
Sure, but people with high perf laptops have high-perf cooling solutions. I'm an engineer/developer and a high end gamer. I have an Alienware laptop (in addition to a Macbook Pro), with an RTX 2070 in it. It never overheats. I take it traveling with me. The M1 has a fillrate 10x slower, and I highly doubt it's competitive on Compute Shader performance either. Even if my RTX laptop were thermally down clocked, it's still got plenty of headroom over the M1 GPU wise.
The only time I worry about heat is if I have to have the laptop in my lap.
On top of all this, AMD's 6nm Rembrandt coming out next year is likely to have a model in the 20W range, which is on par with the M1's "performance" mode, but with much greater GPU performance.
I think the epitaph being written for x86 is a little premature, maybe for Intel, but AMD just delivered 20% IPC improvement, and a huge gfx architecture improvement, with a scalable chiplet architecture going forward.
It would be unwise to count them out.