That’s great and all but for people who are gamers or doing heavy work with the GPU they’re going to be plugged into power most of the time.

I’d rather have a chip that scales to high performance when plugged in and lower GPU performance when I’m on say an airplane or in a cafe, then one whose GPU performance is a half decade behind.

You're bringing up a limitation of the current tech, that it tethers you to a wall, to speak against this new tech. Does a student who has a gap between classes always want to find an outlet somewhere and deal with their computer sounding like it's about to liftoff? Does the video editor offloading some of their workload to GPU always want to find an outlet?

Apple is selling super quiet hypermobile performance here, I see them as occupying a niche with no real competition.

A lot of those students are using Chromebooks, which will get nothing but not cheaper. Video editors almost always want large monitors and top performance. Show me someone who works as a professional video editor who does it on a laptop screen.

The best argument you could make for the MacBook in this regard is for developers who might be working as nomads, and musicians who often lug their machines to their gigs.

But for someone doing heavy 3D, video, or gaming? I just don't see it. The M1 can't even run Tomb Raider above 30 fps. It's a 2 year old game, and isn't even that impressive. A GTX 1080 will yield 2x-3x that performance: https://www.anandtech.com/show/13400/intel-9th-gen-core-i9-9...

I'm just saying, they got a long way to go before that capture the hardcore gamer or 3D rendering market.

>Show me someone who works as a professional video editor who does it on a laptop screen.

I know a videographer who worked for news wire services who did just this and did his job on a MacBook sometimes on site. Helped him deliver news content faster. I don't think video editing on a MBP directly is as rare as you might assume.

No doubt that Mac's haven't turnee into ideal gaming machines, but I've gamed on ultraportables with a lot less GPU than this, I just never played a game like Tomb Raider.

Is it able to use 26.5W while using both GPU and CPU without degrading performance?

The answer is no. 26.5W is only for the CPU. If you also need to use GPU then it throttles or consumes more.

It has a maximum power consumption of 39W, with an idle consumption of 6.8W. Both measured “on wall”, so including ram, storage and everything else.

Compare it to the previous (Intel) generation that uses 20W idle and 122W under load, while not matching the M1 in neither CPU nor GPU performance.

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201897

This does not address wether the GPU throttles in high CPU usage scenarios.

That being said, RAM and storage is pretty negligible. LPDDR4/X uses around 0.2-0.5w, and around 0.1-0.05w for storage.

There is also no reason to compare to Intel. The competition for Macs aren't older macs - newer macs are always going to be better than older macs. The competition is to what they could have been if they went for AMD, and to other computers of similar form-factors.

In both cases, you're comparing to AMD, not Intel.

With regards to performance and power consumption, AMD is not far ahead of Intel. Yes, they have better performance when you factor in all the Intel "bugs" like branch predition, but it's only about 10%-20%, and TDP is more or less the same.

Comparing it to a M1 will yield the same results. The lowest TDP i can could find was 65W for a Ryzen 3, which is still long way from M1 in both power consumption and performance.

https://www.tomshardware.com/features/amd-vs-intel-cpus

Why are you comparing AMD desktop processors with laptop processors on power efficiency? That's incredibly contrived.

Compare the 5900HS with the M1, which is a 35W SoC, just like the M1, and much, much faster than any Rzyen 3.

It’s an SOC. Unless you consider the CPU basically just the ALU and register file (a quite reasonable but long outdated position) it’s all the same power budget for the M series.

It's a simple result. SoC or not, if total power consumption is at X with only the CPU while the GPU is inactive, then it will either be at >X when using both CPU and GPU at the maximum, or be slower in CPU performance.

This holds for SoCs or for systems that manage total power equally.