There is no Macbook with AMD processor, I think that's why it is compared to Intel, that plus Intel being the historic leader

There is no Macbook with AMD processor because Apple didn't want to make it.

Intel is not the leader for 5+ years now.

Let's not get ahead of ourselves. In the notebook space they've been the industry leader for less than 12 months.

This is not the case. The very first Zen laptop parts were far ahead of Intel.

There's plenty of non-Macbooks with AMD processors which are competitive to it.

Comparing to Intel is like comparing to PPC MacBooks - meaningless.

At this point, isn't comparing it to any non-Mac meaningless?

The only way to get an M1 is to buy a Mac anyways.

Unless/until you see a mass exodus of people from x86 based OSes the comparisons don't matter.

Sure, new Macs will be super fast, and that in itself will result in some conversions, but there are plenty of other factors that would keep people from switching to Mac.

At the moment you can buy intel and apple macbooks. They run the same system etc so that's how you can compare the two machines.

Considering that Apple ditched Intel for their own Apple Silicon chips it makes more sense comparing them (for now).

Why? The MacBooks aren't competing against their previous iterations (since you can't buy them anymore), but against their non-Apple competition.

When you'll be buying a new laptop, you won't be choosing between a 2018 MacBook and a 2021 MacBook, but between 2021 MacBook and offerings from Lenovo, Dell, Microsoft and others.

Well, I think the decision is a little more complicated.

If you are upgrading, OS inertia may prevent you from choosing a machine that doesn't run the OS you're currently on. So a lot of Windows users may not even consider a Mac, and vice versa.

The latest 13" x86 MacBook Pro released less than 1 year ago and is still for sale.

There's a Macbook Pro 16" that you cannot get with a M1 Processor. That's the one I have.

So yes, you can compare to the current gen and would be choosing between that.

You sure can still buy the old ones.

I suspect you will be able to for another year or so. See comment from me elsewhere on this thread for my reasoning.

Well, yes, if you look back so to say, you can put an older Intel MBP and a new one with M1 side by side and get a comparison showing the latter fares better. But when you look into the future, if you are a customer considering a purchase of a new laptop with Apple Silicon, they would benefit from a comparison with the top Zen 3 offerins, even though such a comparison might be much trickier than the one with Intel.

The new Zen 3 offerings are indeed tantalizing. Even if you never buy an Apple Silicon Mac, the kick in the pants it has no doubt delivered to both Intel and AMD benefits all of us.

And as a friend keeps reminding me, this is their cheapest entry level processor :)

It'd look less bad for AMD, but still wouldn't look brilliant.

aarch64 allows some tricks that are much harder to pull off on amd64.

AMD still generally outpertforms Apple Silicon despite larger lithographies, so I don't really see it.

AMD Zen 3 outperforms on workloads that can take advantage of having more cores, but for single threaded workloads, it leads in some SPEC subtests and falls behind in others.

https://www.anandtech.com/show/16252/mac-mini-apple-m1-teste...

> AMD still generally outperforms Apple Silicon despite larger lithographies

The single-core benchmarks I saw put the M1 against CPUs with amd64 cores running SMT (which is fair - SMT extracts about 20% of extra parallelism of an amd64 workload, something the M1 does using a humongous reorder buffer on a single thread) with the AMD (and latest Intel) parts showing a slight advantage.

They do so, however, at a much higher TDP which, if my own computers (all but the server under the desk) are any indication, will cause the x86's to throttle down in a couple seconds while the M1 will continue at full steam.

They have a much higher TDP because you are comparing PC parts that are not optimized for power consumption. Their uncore is made using power-inefficient lithographies to save on cost and contribute a ton to power usage.

They also have a lot more cores.

Per high-performance core, M1 macs are tied or less efficient depending on the workload.

> Per high-performance core, M1 macs are tied or less efficient depending on the workload.

That's not what the benchmarks I see say. AMD's chips with 8 amd64 cores beat the M1, which has 4 big cores and 4 low-power ones. In some benchmarks, the x86 laptop CPUs record higher performance, but at a higher clock and with a higher TDP. I don't have the IPC numbers for either, but with a lot of execution ports, its huge reorder buffer and the less strict memory consistency model, I suspect the IPC to be higher on the M1.

The low performance cores of the M1 go anywhere from useless to actively harmful in critical multi thread workloads.

When you are doing serious work, the M1 is really a four core CPU and nothing else.

M1 cores have higher IPC, yes. They are also bigger and slower. Larger reorder buffers and more flexible memory models mean bigger cores which mean slower clock speeds at the same power consumption.

The M1 also doesn't have SMT, which is an easy +20% IPC.

If you measure the performance per core and the power consumption per core, and of course I'm talking only high performance cores, then last gen x86 laptop CPUs are right there despite higher performance.