>AMD 5850U beats Apple M1 in multicore performance by 29% having the same power consumption (15 Watt):

The last part is not entirely accurate. They have the same TDP. Not the same power consumption. Because 5850U doesn't use 15W in those test. The same goes to M1 which is closer to 20W Max.

The word TDP means Typical TDP by both Intel and AMD and not what it means in literal sense. That is excluding cTDP and other state like PL2.

Worth mentioning the M1 achieve those single thread performance at no more than 5W, if you put the two on equal footing, even accounting for the possible node improvement, M1 is still quite far ahead in terms of pref / watt. And the 5850 is already on Zen 3.

Indeed, thank you. It's plainly pathetic this has to be said so often, especially here FFS. Every time this topic comes up "AMD can do the same, 15W" as if the "15W" figure was a terminating value from a set of industry-standard "TDP" figures. It is not, and the "TDP" listed at best offers a clue as to the power draw. Not much more. Hell, it can even differ by motherboard config. Intel encourages it.

The next emotional preservation tactic usually cites the old GF IO Die, but that was only on H/desktop series chips anyways and furthermore they still lose to Apple in sheer performance per watt.

It's August 2021 and we still have to have this conversation. Sigh

It's really _highly_ misleading. I read OPs comment and assumed they are talking about measured power, not TDP.

Don't forget the GPU either. With all the cores going full-out, the M1 can still run its GPU at high clocks.

AMD reduced the CU count down to 8 and ramped the clockspeeds which is terrible for the thermal budget. If you need to offload stuff to the GPU, both GPU clocks and CPU clocks dramatically lower. AMD needs a 16CU design with RDNA2 if they hope to actually compete with current and upcoming designs.

Speaking of upcoming, Apple's next generation will be announced in the next 2-3 weeks. A15 and either M1X or M2 (or maybe both) on N5P which should be 10-15% better than the previous N5 process. That's what 5850U is actually competing against considering how long it took to get out the door.

Things aren't looking pretty for x86. Now if we could just get some nice RISC-V designs shipping...

"The TDP of the [AMD 5850U] APU is specified at 15 Watt (default) and can be configured from 10 to 25 Watt by the laptop vendor (most chips are configured higher than 15 Watt)." [1]

I'd love to see actual measurements for both chips.

[1] https://www.notebookcheck.net/AMD-Ryzen-7-PRO-5850U-Processo...

Yep, you can see the distribution of results (there aren't a lot) here and it's all over the place for the Ryzen vs M1 :

Ryzen : https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=AMD+Ryzen+7+PRO+585...

M1 : https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Apple+M1+8+Core+320...

TDPs don't mean anything even within a vendor lineup, and doing cross comparison is futile (without properly measuring yourself the power consumption at load, then you can start doing real efficiency comparison or apple to apple).

Also, Intel and AMD chips are allowed to greatly exceed those TDP numbers with as much as 50-60 watts peak consumption.

‘Beats’ ‘benchmark’ ‘nm’ are all marketing terms. You can only do so much comparison using such numbers but what you miss completely is that we are not putting them in a server farm. x86 is still coming as a CPU offering while the M1 and ARM chips are SOCs. It reduces system power as far less separate chips are needed to do other stuff while simultaneously being much more performant. A 5850U miniPC uses a 65w power brick. An M1 mini sips at best 39W. You would have to compare 1.65xM1 with 1x5850U

nm might be a marketing term, but it's sure as hell meaningful. This goes double here as we're comparing between TSMC 7nm and TSMC 5nm, of which the latter is definitively superior in power efficiency.

Similarly, benchmarking is a core component of CPU evaluation, allowing for isolated (and combined) analysis of the CPU's performance characteristics.

Handwaving both of these away is extremely misleading.

I don't think that this is correct. My laptop, Lenovo P14S GEN 2 AMD with 5850U CPU has 65 WATT USB-C power adapter. Half of that power will be consumed by monitor (4K and 500 cd/m²) and you write above that the whole system should consume 65 WATT... This is not possible at all, because there is only 30-35 WATT left for the whole system except monitor.

If your system exceeds the maximum amount of power provided by the power adapter, it will use the internal battery. Otherwise it will throttle the CPU.

Laptops are not designed to do that under consumer operating conditions (they can, sure, but they won’t). No manufacturer will ship you a system with an adapter that can’t power the machine at peak load.

That is not true, Apple laptops (and probably others) are known exactly to do this. The infamous i9 MacBook Pro 16" could definitely use more power than the supplied power adapter and drain the batterie under load. And that was perfectly within its specification.

The Dell G5 15 is designed to do that and the feature is called hybrid power mode.

https://www.dell.com/support/kbdoc/en-us/000140513/gaming-la...

This one honestly reads more like a “we fucked up let’s call it a feature in an obscure technical amendment”.

You'd be surprised, this is how most modern "high end" Intel laptop actually works. Even some Intel Macbook Pro exhibited this.

This is 100% an Intel thing.

Another possibility is cost reduction as these are lower-end models. At least some of higher-end models (G7 and Alienware) have 180W and 240W power adapters, instead of the 130W included with this model.

Counterpoint:

https://www.pcmag.com/news/gaming-on-surface-book-2-drains-b...

> In other words, the laptop will throttle back performance automatically regardless of the settings you chose.

So if you change the performance settings they allow the laptop to draw 10W from the battery while plugged in for a little bit but it will throttle down to 95W to keep itself running. It still throttles which is I think the GGP’s point.

The point is that a laptop with a 65W power adapter can in fact, draw 90W (or more) for a period of time in practice.

Which means, we don't really have a good way to benchmark power usage on laptops in a practical sense. We'd likely need to bust out the soldering iron + oscilloscope and measure currents entering the laptop's VRMs to accurately measure power usage over time.

I know laptops / cores have an "amp-counter" on board somewhere, but there's no guarantee that these devices are consistent or accurate across different laptops. Its sufficient for measuring how much energy different bits of code has (ex: Linux powertop tools), but not sufficient at comparing Apple M1 vs AMD Zen3 chips. We need a 3rd, trusted and independent measurement of power usage.

We can't just assume a 65W power adapter leads to 65W peak usage. Perhaps in the past when laptop designs were more in spec that was a decent assumption. But that time has passed, and today's laptops often do peak at power usages far in excess of their charger capacities (albeit temporarily, but even then, that makes measurements / benchmarks very difficult).

--------

I guess if you physically remove the battery pack (is that still allowed on these laptops?) and then plug it in, we might be getting somewhere. But the Macbook Pro doesn't have an easily removable battery pack.

Completely agree on everything.

That's the reason we didn't review laptop CPUs when I reviewed CPUs. You can get exact CPU power draw on a desktop motherboard (by using an amp clamp on the P8 connector) but it's hard (or not possible) to do that across multiple laptop chassis.

Removing battery (when possible) is not a solution either as what you get may differ a lot from classic "plugged in" usage (see the references to the MacBook Pro and Dell that used an i9 that still drained the battery when plugged in, because they can use more power than the power adapter brings).

On top of that, way too much depends on the OEM design and the performance of a given CPU will greatly vary from one chassis to another, because of the various throttling mechanism and the various configurable things that OEM can do (it's not just the cTDP, you can as an OEM play with various turbo times, another person mentionned P2 states, which is one of those).

So a given mobile CPU performance means nothing at the end of the day, only the laptop "as a whole" can be measured, which is why you don't see good quality benchmarks of mobile CPUs.

Anyway, just a small complement :

> laptops / cores have an "amp-counter" on board somewhere

Intel (and AMD to some measure) CPUs all have various sensors on chip that gives you the power consumption in watts (or amps, depending). They can be read with software such as hwinfo [1].

Those are usually not incredibly reliable though, they are not calibrated per CPU and it's very much a guestimate that could easily be in some cases +/- 5W off.

So sadly, not usable either (especially on mobile).

[1] : https://www.hwinfo.com/

But the M1 air charges and runs simultaneously on a 30W USB-C power brick…it has a slightly dimmer display at 400 nits.

I've even plugged my M1 Air into the 20W USB-C iPad charger with no ill effects (somewhat slower charging while it's in use). It's possible that the battery would stop charging or deplete if I had the brightness cranked all the way up and the CPU was doing something intensive.

Check the sibling comments, your CPU (like most mobile Intel/AMd) can be configured for different TDPs by the OEMs, so you can't compare anything, especially not PassMark results.

Yes, you can throttle the CPU, but then the CPU scores in Benchmarks will be lower and that's not the case... (Benchmarks are collected from different machines). So it looks the Macs consume pretty much the same amount of power.

No, the TDP is configurable up to 25W (and down to 10). Again check the link of the score distribution I put in another comment, it's all over the place, and the passmark results are not a reliable comparison at that point.

No. AMD Ryzen™ 7 PRO 5850U can boost upto 4.4Ghz, likely it would be consuming upwards of 50W for that short duration.

An easy way to verify it, is to measure the benchmark delta when on battery and when connected to an external power source. (M1 benchmarks remains almost the same)

Intel i7 9750H for example has a P2 of above 80W and only then can it break the 4Ghz barrier. Even though the processor is technically rated only 45W. At 45W it can just maintain the base clock i.e. 2.6Ghz on all cores.

M1 is much more efficient than any x86 chip on the market right now.

The M1 is hitting 4gHz across only 4 of it's cores, whereas the 9750 is driving 6 (and 12 threads on top of that). Furthermore, the M1 will have no problem hitting ~20w during peak load, so frankly the math checks out to me. The comparison definitely starts to deteriorate once you consider that the M1 is ~3x as transistor-dense as the Intel chip, and part of me actually wonders why they didn't get more power out of a chip that only needs to worry about a handful of instructions and doesn't know about hyper-threading.

Pretty sure M1 does not hit that frequency on any of its cores…

I was under the impression that the performance cores had hit 4.1gHz before, is that incorrect?

Max frequency is 3.2GHz and you can max pretty much indefinitely on the pro with a fan or the air with the heatsink mod.

These days nanometers are just marketing, they are disconnected from the actual chip density

Well in that case both are made by TSMC so it's comparable. But PassMark results in general are not that great (they use micro benchmarks that may not be representative or are optimised for by vendors).

More importantly, as pointed out by a sibling comment, the AMD CPU in question (like most mobile Intel CPUs) has a "configurable" TDP which is set higher on most products sold. And PassMark doesn't differentiate those and only mention the "official" TDP.

To PassMark credit, they give a distribution of performance scores, just compare the distribution of the Ryzen and the M1 and you'll see (you have to scroll down a bit to see the graphs) :

Ryzen : https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=AMD+Ryzen+7+PRO+585...

M1 : https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Apple+M1+8+Core+320...

In general, you can't compare TDPs even within a brand, they rarely mean what it used to mean a few years back as they "innovate" with various turbo mechanism and other OEM configurable settings.

Both chips are produced at TSMC factories, so both have the same meaning. We do not compare here two different manufacturers.

Yeah, no. The libraries used can and do differ.

Just to give an idea of how crazy it is here is a list of the synopsys TSMC 7nm cell libraries [1] and of course their are other companies that offer additional cell libraries. Also I have no way of proving this, but I wouldn't be at all surprised if both AMD and Apple have their own customizations or additions to whatever cell library they use.

[1] https://www.synopsys.com/dw/emllselector.php?f=TSMC&n=7&s=r3...

When did this happen? I think I've read somewhere that process node size stopped being a meaningful indicator even decades ago.

How so? Architecture?

Serious question, as I'm in the market: are there any mac mini like systems that feature an AMD 5850U?

EDIT: not the same processor: https://simplynuc.com/cbm1r8rb/

I'd consider waiting a couple weeks. There's several rumors that the redesigned Mac Mini is coming soon. It should have an 8 big-core (and 2-4 little cores) variant and probably up to 64gb of RAM as options in a much smaller package (most of the M1 mini was empty space because it reused the x86 case).

How is the AMD in terms of heat? Have they matched Apple in terms of cooling requirements etc?

Given similar power consumption, cooling is up to the OEM, not the chipmaker. So this question should be directed at Clevo, Dell, HP, Lenovo, ASUS, Acer, Tongfang, etc.

This is physics after all and 15W are 15W no matter if they go into an Apple M1 or an AMD Ryzen.

It’s not as simple as seeing 15W and saying the thermal load is the same: they don’t have constant usage so you have to compare the actual power usage for workloads you care about. Some manufacturers are more conservative so you need uncommon combinations to hit the maximum output whereas other chips will approach that in normal usage.

This is also where design decisions matter: for example, a while back I measured hashing performance for some boxes which needed to check data integrity and an Intel chip handily lost despite being faster on everything else because the embedded processor I was comparing it to had dedicate SHA hardware which was both faster and more power efficient than a generic x86 implementation. That’s ancient history now but I would expect Apple to aggressively explore opportunities to improve their stack like that since they control it at every level - for example, I believe benchmarks have shown Objective-C message passing is considerably faster on M1.

Optimising applications for specific hardware has nothing to do with the hardware manufacturer if the software and hardware come from different suppliers, though.

Apple has the advantage of developing and deploying hardware, OS and system software completely in-house.

AMD only supplies chips and basic firmware, both of which can be configured by OEMs/ODMs and the OS and software come from entirely different parties again.

So the usage profile depends on external factors, not just the CPU itself. In the end, however, a 15W power budget is a 15W power budget and an M1 under full load and a Ryzen under full load will have the same thermal output if configured the same (as far as power consumption goes).

How well the waste heat is managed is not in the hands of the CPU.

Your position appears to be conflating requiring coordination with impossibility. Apple has it easier in some ways but it’s not like AMD/Intel, Microsoft, Dell, et al. don’t work together, too. Similarly, while you’re not entirely wrong that the ISVs customize firmware and settings, the defaults and range of options are constrained by the CPU design.

Finally, again, 15W TDP is not the same as 15W under normal usage. That misunderstanding appears to be driving most of your disagreements in this thread.

> Finally, again, 15W TDP is not the same as 15W under normal usage. That misunderstanding appears to be driving most of your disagreements in this thread.

No. The CPUs can be configured to consume no more than 15 Watts, even if few OEMs do so. Same goes for the M1 - there's no difference with regards to this: both the MBP 13 and the Mac Mini have higher power limits and active cooling for that reason.

In fact, the latest U-series mobile Ryzen CPUs are even optimised to be most efficient at a 15W power level, contrary to Intel's Ice Lake chips, which get the most performance at a higher wattage configuration of 28 Watts.

Again, as a number of people corrected you, it's not a simple 15W figure but specifically the listed maximum 15W thermal design power (TDP).

That's a term in the industry with a specific meaning:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_design_power

The key thing to understand is that this is not measured power consumption while running the benchmarks and you cannot reliably compare the values even across the same product line, much less across chips — especially when we're talking about SoC designs where, for example, the TDP refers to the entire chip but the benchmarks being discussed are all CPU-focused and don't even exercise the GPU at all. We also know that TDP numbers are not a hard ceiling: there are some chips which under some conditions — most commonly but not always synthetic benchmarks — will exceed those figures, possibly by somewhat significant margins.

OK. For the last time, here's a freakin' screenhot to illustrate the point: https://ibb.co/QYnj40r

What you see there is are the power limits of the CPU (as reported by HWInfo64).

If you set the POWER LIMIT in the UEFI/BIOS, this regulates THE POWER consumption of the chip. NOTHING to do with TDP.

Why is that so hard to grasp for you? You can even measure the power rom the wall to confirm this. I am NOT talking about TDP here!

In theory it's 15W and 15W, but both chips can use more than that amount under certain circumstances and the AMD chip can even be configured by OEMs with different TDPs. Plus they heat up differently under the same workloads due to different chip features and optimizations (as the sibling comment mentioned).

To my knowledge, the only AMD chips approved for fanless designs are their 5-6w embedded chips and the same is true for Intel.

Those chips usually have 3.5-4GHz turbos, but in a fanless config, you'll never see them (and even with active cooling, you won't see them for more than a handful of seconds).

Power curves and C-state handling is also performed by the firmware, which is again controlled by the OEM/ODM not the chipmaker.

Can 5850U run fanless at full load? That's the table-stakes that Apple has raised.