I actually think this sort of thing is counterproductive - makes me more sceptical of potentially more credible assessments.

Not to mention power comparisons are not entirely fair considering the node disadvantage Intel has. I would be excited if Intel can show higher clicks and overall IPC with reasonable excess power attributable to node difference.

It's absolutely fair. Try to find an Intel CPU on the market without a node disadvantage. Doesn't exist. We can only (and it only makes sense to) compare what exists now, what consumers are able to buy right now. If Intel magically comes up with a CPU that runs on a similar node, then sure, but until then, the reality is that they're on the market at a node disadvantage. That's not something you can just wave away as "oh, well, Apple has a better node". All that matters is what devices you can buy and what their performance/power metrics are actually like.

Agreed. The argument seems to be I’ll be happy with Intel if IPC etc is competitive as I want the raw power and don’t care about battery life etc. Which might just be true for a very small section of the laptop buying market but leads to a much less useful product for the very large majority.

The point of fairness is not to give participation trophies to a company because the others had better tools. If a product is worse, then it is worse. Warm feelings because Intel does not have access to the best technology is not going to make any laptop run cooler.

I can understand the “they’re an underdog, so they deserve some money even if their products are not the absolute best”, but casting Intel as the poor underdog being steamrolled by their competition because they cannot get the latest and greatest is strange, to say the least.

I should have clarified this earlier. Personally I'm interested in how competitive Intel will be in the future (their stock took a massive dive recently).

Right now, it seems to me that Intel is behind both on the node and on the architecture vs M1 (and AMD). I expect them to eventually fix the node (or just buy from TSMC) but if they don't fix the latter that's a big deal.

From the POV of buying a CPU/laptop today, absolutely, power comparison and performance both are essential.

You've got a point, but the discussions are most of the time not about the theoretical characteristics of an architecture on a process node that it will never use. It's people beating each other on the head about which mega-corp has CPUs a few percents faster than the other.

From a historical point of view, a systematic shift to hotter, more power-hungry chips was never a good sign (see for example the various Pentium 4s and the successive incarnations of Bulldozer and Piledriver). I hope it's a stopgap and that they have a new Core 2 masterpiece being readied, but let's not kid ourselves: it does not look good. the Physics of heat transfer put a limit to the gains in performance you can achieve if you don't also increase efficiency. It's cold comfort to know that your CPU would be wonderful if cooled with liquid nitrogen when your desktop throttles under load.

That’s a very fair perspective.

I’m an Intel bear on their existing markets - mainly because even if they achieve parity with TSMC the lead is gone and others will take market share.

I’m more positive on the Intel GPU business though given the potential huge demand for ML compute.

Crazy how things change, isn’t it? How unthinkable would “Apple is a bully, give poor Intel a break” have seemed 20 years ago?

No, but you can see that AMD beats Apple in Power-Performance:

https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/AMD-Ryzen-7-PRO-5850U-v...

AMD 5850U 1253 scores vs Apple M1 1004 scores

Waiting for apple fanboys telling me something like "but TDP is not a good measure"...

Not an «apple fanboy». You should justify that TDP is the measure we are looking for, instead of just the available measure. TDP is a maximum, and an average one for that matter.

Those measures should use something like `powerstat` results standardizing other conditions - in fact, they should use benchmarking (just like the numerator of the numbers you report does, but not the denominator). This system here has a TDP of 6W, but uses 3.3W during light use, and peaks around 7.5W.

Sure, there could be a literal interpretation of "Performance/Power" which somehow could link speed and TDP (benchmarking at the same stated TDP), but (°) it would be imprecise as TDP is an estimate (so consumption should be benchmarked) and (°) it would not represent some more useful scenarios like "which system allows squeezing more working time out of a battery" (which is not represented by considering maximums - especially given technologies like big.LITTLE).

Similarly, Intel often states TDPs of 25W, 45W, 65W, etc... while peaking actual power usage at nearly double those numbers during "power boost."

So unfortunately TDP has basically become a marketing term and we're back to literally measuring power usage instead. Which of course gets complicated when you consider that different machines have wildly different heat management systems.

"TDP" as such is going away for Alder Lake. Intel is now using a much clearer base power and turbo power number. So for example, the new i5-12600K has a Base Speed of 3700MHz @ 125W and Turbo Speed of 4900MHz @ 150W (if and when thermals allow it) [0]. The old marketing would've just called this a TDP of 125W.

[0] https://www.anandtech.com/show/16959/intel-innovation-alder-...

M1 Max operates with a peak of 50W. With a top performance difference of let’s say 20% (unattainable by Intel), I care more about having a computer that runs at 50W tops than a water boiler at 150W.

It’s fascinating to me that society was willing to accept laptops that could not safely be used on a human’s lap for so long. My ‘old’ 16” MacBook Pro could probably cook an egg.

Isn't that a part of the reason why many times they were marketed as "notebook PCs" instead of "laptops"?

if your electric kettle is only 150W then it must take you a long time to make tea.

Why are you comparing with the lowest spec M1 chip?

I think this might be the comparison you were after? https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/AMD-Ryzen-7-PRO-5850U-v...

I compared 15W CPUs and you putted 30W CPU (M1 MAX) in the comparison... Nice try but such tricks will not work with me.

To be strictly fair, the AMD Ryzen 7 PRO 5850U is a 10-25W TDP depending on manufacturer configuration, not nailed to 15W. Do cpubenchmark verify that it's running at a 15W TDP when coalescing the numbers?

There is no guarantee for that, but usually 5850U is used in ultra-thin laptops and they don't have enough cooling for more than 15W... For example, CPU in Thinkpad X1 Extreme GEN 4 is limited 27 WATT (at least models without vapor chamber) and it's a laptop with quite a good cooling and larger size.

the m1 max is a 90w cpu

Source?

That Ryzen chip has 20% slower single thread performance, which is what really matters for desktop workloads

That's significantly less true than it was in the past. I think it's pretty easy to argue that the browser is the most important desktop app now and all modern browsers are multiprocess / multithreaded.

Beyond that, almost everything that does signal processing of some shape or another (audio, video, whatever) is multithreaded these days, so that one's out too. Compiling code is multi-process too.

I actually struggle to think of important work loads that are single-threaded these days. Obviously most simple apps are, but mainly because they don't use enough CPU to bother optimizing. We're more than a decade into multi-core systems being the norm and most CPU-heavy apps have taken advantage of that.

Performance of UI is mostly single threaded

Sure, but there are very few UIs that require 100% of a modern CPU core. Exceptions exist, but they're just that, exceptions.

I'd go one step further and say that if modern apps are doing that that they should move the CPU heavy tasks out of the message thread. (And most have, again, since we're like 10-15 years into multi-core systems being the default.)

I struggled to understand that you compute score/TDP

> Waiting for apple fanboys telling me something like "but TDP is not a good measure"...

Not an Apple fan, but TDP is not even a measurement, it's a specification of the heat dissipation required for that CPU. So in theory it corresponds to the maximum power dissipated by the CPU under load, but in practice two machines with the same TDP may be equipped with differently dimensioned heatsinks which will influence your metric. You should consider using a real average power consumption measurement to establish your metric.

> So in theory it corresponds to the maximum power dissipated by the CPU under load

I think this isn't quite right - TDP is the amount of heat the system needs to be able to dissipate in order to prevent thermal throttling at a given base speed. If the system can dissipate more (and provide more power), chips can clock higher to a turbo or boost speed.

yes, that's why I put "in theory". But you're right, I should have written something like "with a simplistic perspective" instead.

Preemptively calling anyone with some opinion an “Apple fanboy” isn’t nice, or probably accurate.

Not in single core. For multi core it’s probably the SMT, but that’s a security risk.