[Spoiler because I don't think I'll get a response -- there are none. Even when you get into the "luggable" category of workstation that is ostensibly portable but really needs to be plugged in, there is no competition right now. The upcoming Alder Lake should significantly improve Intel's entrant in this category, and hopefully brings some real competition]
Xeon W-11955M (8 cores)
But I'm just going to tell it to you now so we don't make the same mistake we have for the past 10 years of computer hardware discussions: specs don't matter. You could tell 90% of the people buying PCs with dGPUs about your 5nm GPU and next-gen power efficiency, but they won't care. They're buying them as gaming devices, general-purpose machines and game development laptops. I'd argue the market for Mac users and PC users has not radically shifted, just the hardware you're using. If we're here to talk smack about hardware superiority, this website would have been insufferable for the past decade, because there was quite literally a complete lack of professional dGPU Macs. Now that the tables have shifted slightly, I don't see why Mac users feel the need to crawl out of the woodwork and declare the game as changed, now that Prometheus gave them the gift of a laptop that doesn't throttle to hell.
That doesn't change the fact that the above claim about "laptop Xeon chips" beating the pants off the M1 Max is delusional nonsense.
I have to comment on the RTX 3080 bit: I have used many PC laptops over my career, and currently have a Lenova with a fat, barnburner Nvidia dGPU. The GPU is literally never used, because the moment it engages my battery life falls to cartoonish levels (somewhere in the range of 40 minutes), the laptop becomes a space heater, and the fans turn into jet engines. This is the sort of "spec chasing" that the industry is addicted to, providing absurd, completely unreasonable solutions just so someone can boast. One of the things about Apple, quite contrary to your claim, is that they don't do that. When they provide something, it is meaningfully usable and useful 100% of the time.
I do love this review though:
"It is a nice laptop but extremely noisy. Even when idle the fans are on all the time."
I remember memory bandwidth being the bottleneck when running large(ish) datasets for game worlds. It was so much that we put a lot of pressure on google cloud because we worried they wouldn't be able to compete with bare metal (since it's not usually measured, reported and can be non-guaranteed when you have neighbours).
They are what would previously have been branded as "Xeon E3" series chips - on the desktop platform they used to share a socket and be drop-in upgrades with consumer desktop chips, because they're basically the same chips with "enterprise" features like ECC turned on.
An example would be Xeon E3-1285 v3 - which is basically the same thing as an i7 4770.
These products are nowhere, nowhere near the M1 Max. They are consumer laptop chips with ECC and vPro turned on.
I'm also not sure why you're sarcastic about ECC RAM. I have 128GB of RAM in my laptop. If it wasn't ECC, I'd have crashes in my VMs and errors in my calculations. When you go 32GB+ and actually use the RAM, anything that doesn't support ECC cannot be taken seriously for professional use. Like the M1 Max.
So, really no need to test them specifically. Go get an 1185G7 or something and you know what “Mobile Xeon” benches will look like. Anandtech already did those benches.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiger_Lake#List_of_Tiger_Lake_...
So based on Anandtech’s benchmark you can pretty much extrapolate how that is going to go - slightly lower performance and slightly higher efficiency due to TDP limiting clocks a bit, but same cache, same core configuration, etc mean that it’ll be identical to if you went into bios on a 11980HK and set a lower power limit.
By the way the 11980HK is specifically the chip they called out the M1 Max as being a factor-of-6 more power efficient than. And in fact they said exactly what I just said - that limiting TDP will reduce performance on the 11955M and the perf/W gap will close a bit, but the performance gap will get even wider.
> In multi-threaded tests, the 11980HK is clearly allowed to go to much higher power levels than the M1 Max, reaching package power levels of 80W, for 105-110W active wall power, significantly more than what the MacBook Pro here is drawing. The performance levels of the M1 Max are significantly higher than the Intel chip here, due to the much better scalability of the cores. The perf/W differences here are 4-6x in favour of the M1 Max, all whilst posting significantly better performance, meaning the perf/W at ISO-perf would be even higher than this.
https://www.anandtech.com/show/17024/apple-m1-max-performanc...
What’s your dealie, why so toxic?
That article says that the M1 Max CPU TDP will be ~30W. The 90W figure is for the whole chip, which includes the GPU. The Xeon is just the CPU.
> here's that Xeon beating that 11090HK.
The CPUmark figure is 24092 for the Xeon, versus 23549 for the i9. That's a difference of about 2%. I suspect it's mostly down to statistical error. (Maybe it's also true that the Xeons tend to be put in systems whose other hardware is faster; I can see that going either way.)
You don’t understand what you’re talking about and you’re openly hostile to the person who tried to explain it to you lol.
"Don't feed egregious comments by replying; flag them instead."
a.k.a. please don't feed the trolls
>You don’t understand what you’re talking about
So you look at the graph I linked that shows the Xeon model is faster than the consumer I9 chip. And your brain says "the Xeon is slower." Then tell me I don't know what I'm talking about.
Tell me, do you ever stand in a lake and tell people you're dry? Are you in the lake to hide the pee? Do you tell people about the wonders of horse dewormer?
See, the only way your argument works is to compare the M1 to the I9. And despite the Xeon being faster than the I9, as literally and plainly shown in the tests I linked, you keep saying it's slower. ... But then you keep saying they're the same. Reality: it's faster, literally look at the numbers. Your mental gymnastics are amazing. I am not hostile. I have been getting great laughs and relaxation out of you. Yes, that comes at your expense.
> person who tried to explain it to you
By saying wet is dry. I get your explanation. I just see what my eyes tell me. You see blue, your brain says "nah, it's orange."
M1X is using DDR5 which does have on-die ECC.
Apple has never sold a laptop with a Xeon in it.
It's only a little thicker than the macbook pro. It's keyboard doesn't break, and the product line has had a 4k screen since 5 years ago. It's 120Hz refresh rate. It has a very large power brick - 240W, it gets hot and loud with a huge fan exhaust. It's thick metal and about 7-9lb - you can run over it with a car. It only gets 9 hours battery w/ regular usage, and about 3 hours of "fan on time." Keep in mind, with the large and loud fan on, it can stay at 5GHz. This is called a pro laptop - a workstation. When I travel, I bring a 65W PSU, and it runs fine on that, just w/o turbo boost.
No, don't point to the lower "geekbench" score for this laptop - that's not a CPU test. GPU performance is a large part of that test, and they run the test on the default GPU. The M1 only has a single GPU. The Precision's default is the low power integrated graphics, not the discreet GPU. If you have a test where they assign the discreet GPU, please feel free to point it out.
As I've discussed before here, I have a shell script that runs in parallel with a bunch of VMs. My coworkers air (yes, I know it's not the max) runs it in 8-10 hours overnight. I run it over lunch. It loads, does calculations on, and creates graphs from several gig of ascii performance data.
What does compare in performance to the M1 air is my Latitude w/ the I7 in it. The M1 "max" is "max for apple" but competes with mid-tier laptops from everyone else. And that's ignoring the fact that it can't run pretty much any of the useful industry tools or games w/o recompiling x86 to arm on the fly.
Yes, I think my Dell cost the company $7-8k, without support. That's why it's called a pro laptop.
You go on a diatribe about how it doesn’t compete, but your only source is some proprietary workload that you claim is much faster on your laptop.
... but the way you present it undermines your case a bit.
It seems like what you want to say is that if money is no object, weight is no object, heat is no object, battery life is no object, and portability is no object, but the comparison must absolutely be laptop to laptop, then there exists a laptop PC configuration that beats M1. If this is your point, then probably you want to compare an M1 Max to your PC, not your coworker's Macbook Air (which is a fanless laptop...)
I think this is a pretty unusual use case and there aren't too many people who are looking for this exact market segment. I definitely think it's fair to admit that Apple isn't intending to operate in this market segment, for better or worse.
You'd probably also want to drop the part about game support, since anyone who wants to play games can spend 1/4 what your workbench costs and get a shitkicking fast small form factor PC. But also, like, recompilation isn't what you should highlight -- what you should highlight is performance. If the recompilation is fast enough for users not to notice, then it doesn't matter, and if it's not, then the reason why it matters is performance, not recompilation.
Anyway, again, I don't think you're necessarily wrong or whatever here, but you're just presenting your point in a way that I think it's extremely unlikely anyone will care or be convinced.
(Also, "discrete")
The 2TB M1 macbook 16" is $4,300 and the 8TB, max-specced version is $6,100.
I know Apple has a bad rap for high prices, but that machine's prices make Apple prices look bargain basement. You could almost buy TWO M1 macs for the price of one 4TB Dell.
A more practical and better deal would be to get a standard laptop and a beefy workstation/grid you can ssh into.