Makes sense. The real story with M1 isn't so much about how amazingly innovative Apple's CPU design is (although it is pretty good), as much as how Intel has rested on their laurels for 5 years.

Now, if only AMD could bring back that ARM Zen design that they cancelled a few months before Ryzen 1st Gen...

The M1 is great because it's fanless. AMD Ryzen is superb on workstations, but let's see if they can deliver a nice fanless or low power option. I hope they do.

The Ryzen mobile chips, including the upcoming Ryzen 7 5800U mentioned above, have a low 10W (configurable up to 25W) TDP. That's in the ballpark of Apple's chip.

That number isn't very meaningful - because it applies to the base clocks only... which is a big catch.

Go beyond that and the power usage balloons quickly (won't repeat myself, see my other comment on this thread at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25231798).

On laptops, more power efficiency maps directly to increased performance (turbo clocks provide higher performance in bursts or at the expense of your laptop's fans sounding like a jet turbine).

My laptop with a Ryzen 5 4500U is only fan-free at idle. OEMs would need to do some serious work on cooling to make that work.

Only the MacBook Air is fanless, and of course it throttles after a while, that's why there's the Pro with a fan on the M1

if 7nm Zen3 is close, then 5nm can probably match without a fan.

It’s almost like power efficiency is all about the process node. M1 is 5nm. It’s a great core but it’s power profile would not be so impressive at a larger node.

Its not enough of a jump to close the gap. the a14 did not bring major improvements in power efficiency, despite being on 5nm.

Dennard called and would like to have his scaling back.

>Now, if only AMD could bring back that ARM Zen design that they cancelled

Oh yes that would rock and open up a whole new level of fault tolerance as could run real-time upon two different CPU cores in parallel, which for some workloads would add value.

Certainly adding an ARM chiplet would be cool and technically doable, though so would a RISC V core and if Nvidia buy ARM then that choice may become political.

> if Nvidia buy ARM then that choice may become political.

If? Was that a typo? They have indeed [https://nvidianews.nvidia.com/news/nvidia-to-acquire-arm-for...]

Unless changed in the past couple of days - It still needs approval. So be UK, China and USA approval needed of varying degree's. That said, I don't foresee any hurdles, but the ink not been signed yet.

It is super exciting, but when do you think 5800 powered laptops will be widely available? April or May of next year? Close to 6 months after M1 powered machines.

Lately Lenovo has been quite quick releasing AMD variants of Thinkpads. I'd say March or April.

That’s pretty close then. Great.

Hilarious... the M1 isn't innovative because AMD might ship a half-competitive chip in six months of nothing slips (and ignoring base vs turbo power consumption).

Truly the goal posts are always moving.

Isn't that the whole point of innovation?

Interesting - what’s the power consumption on it?

Previous gen (4800U) was 15W TDP by default (configurable between 10W and 25W).

This new one (5800U) was not yet officially announced.

Sadly, TDP is far from held on those. What you get at 15W is the base clock present at: https://www.anandtech.com/show/15324/amd-ryzen-4000-mobile-a...

For the Ryzen 7 4800U, that's just 1.8GHz. 4.2GHz which is the turbo clock blows through that limit by a lot. (of course that's for multi-core workloads)

For Ryzen 5th generation, we have this for per-core only power draw, without the I/O: https://www.anandtech.com/show/16214/amd-zen-3-ryzen-deep-di...

We can see from the graph at https://images.anandtech.com/doci/16214/PerCore-1-5950X_575p... that to reach 6.6W per core, the clock has to fall to 3.8GHz. At such a clock, Zen 3 is way behind the Apple M1 performance wise.

Power consumption is the key factor here.