The AMD offerings are much closer to M1 although they're not yet on TSMC 5nm so they don't quite match it. It's a historic event. Intel was #1 in laptops for an eternity. Even when the Pentium 4 was being outclassed by AMD Intel still kept the crown in mobile. This time around they first got overtaken by AMD and then by Apple and are now #3. Puts into perspective how huge of a miss their process node fail was.

Let’s remember AMD was absolute garbage for like 10 years until around 2016, when they finally bounced back. And they were getting closer and closer to bankruptcy, having to flog the silver - their fabs and even their campus. I’d say the Zen design and tsmc saved them (or Lisa Su and Keller).

Intel is in a better position financially than AMD was, and could catch up again. I tend to think it depends a lot on the organization and the people.

Jim Keller?

IC: A few people consider you 'The Father of Zen', do you think you’d scribe to that position? Or should that go to somebody else?

JK: Perhaps one of the uncles. There were a lot of really great people on Zen. There was a methodology team that was worldwide, the SoC team was partly in Austin and partly in India, the floating-point cache was done in Colorado, the core execution front end was in Austin, the Arm front end was in Sunnyvale, and we had good technical leaders. I was in daily communication for a while with Suzanne Plummer and Steve Hale, who kind of built the front end of the Zen core, and the Colorado team. It was really good people. Mike Clark's a great architect, so we had a lot of fun, and success. Success has a lot of authors - failure has one. So that was a success. Then some teams stepped up - we moved Excavator to the Boston team, where they took over finishing the design and the physical stuff, Harry Fair and his guys did a great job on that. So there were some fairly stressful organizational changes that we did, going through that. The team all came together, so I think there was a lot of camaraderie in it. So I won't claim to be the ‘father’ - I was brought in, you know, as the instigator and the chief nudge, but part architect part transformational leader. That was fun.

I don’t know the truth but that was spoken like a true humble leader. If I was forced to draw conclusions just based on that one exchange, I would agree that Jim Keller was an instrumental part of the successful design and implementation of the zen microarchitecture.

This is from an AnandTech interview with Jim Keller: https://www.anandtech.com/show/16762/an-anandtech-interview-...

The whole interview was deeply inspiring. There is a very great deal to be learned from studying it. Listen carefully, and more than once! The audio is probably better than the text, at least first time through.

I love the ARM frontend casually thrown in there, I wonder if that project is back on the table these days.

The AMD PSP is already an ARM chip in your amd64 CPU.

I feel the project was put on hold purely for business reasons, as in there's still a lot of money to be made on x86.

That and Microsoft has had an exclusivity agreement with Qualcomm for Windows on ARM. Once that agreement expires, I expect AMD to suddenly have some very interesting offerings.

Wait, floating-point cache? Does it cache FP operation results? Where can I read more about this?

Probably inner-loop op sequences.

After running benchmarks on Intel and AMD CPUs from that era with mitigations, it's clear Intel never really had a performance lead due to design. That alone rewrites the entire "state of AMD" narrative.

If Intel only had a competitive advantage during that era because they traded performance for security, was there ever really an advantage?

I personally don't think Gelsinger is going to be able to fix their culture issues. He's been more intent on pumping stock and asking for handouts than innovating, which is part of what got them where they are in the first place, for good or ill.

> they traded performance for security, was there ever really an advantage

Security is important, I would always prefer a secure product. But given design habits that elide security for performance, as well as a compromised supply chain, the only choice we have is to side with the devil(s) we know.

It's just awareness that Intel hasn't shown they have any qualms about willfully overselling capability or externalizing technical debts.

Even with longer fulfillment timelines, availability isn't necessary worth the surprise cost of competitiveness.

Lifecycling early and having to buy additional hardware to meet capacity was passed onto our customers.

>Let’s remember AMD was absolute garbage for like 10 years until around 2016

After being ahead of Intel in the Pentium 4 era. The problem back then was marketing and giant amount of (probably illegal now) bundling that was rampant back then.

That last part is important. While Intel had good fab engineers, they also relied on cutthroat business deals requiring exclusivity to get discounts and promotional support and there were constant shenanigans with things like compiler support.

AMD had to make a much better product to get manufacturers to consider it, not just being price competitive. It took the P4 train wreck to get the market to shift but Intel had enough lock-in to make it to the Core generation without losing too much market share because so many of the vendors had those contracts.

And, to be clear, even though P4 was a disaster, Intel was STILL the market leader everywhere. They responded with the Core line only after years of AMD eating their lunch with the Athlon, Athlon 64, and Athlon XP line.

Thunderbird was released in 1999 and from there to the Core 2 Duo release in 2006, AMD was the performance leader (certainly at a huge discount compared to intel offerings).

> AMD was absolute garbage for like 10 years until around 2016

Their top performance was lower than Intel in many cases, but it was certainly not "absolute garbage". For low- to mid-range they offered similar performance with usually a (much) lower price point. For normal "average person" usage they were often the better choice in terms of "bang for your buck".

The main reason we were selling Intels is because we got a rebate from Intel for every CPU we sold. Financially it didn't really matter if we sold a €400 computer, €500, or €600 computer: the profit margin for us was roughly identical (a little bit more, but not much), but with Intel you got a rebate back-channelled, so then it did matter.

Well okay. But they had the same problem Intel is in now: they pushed an inefficient power hungry chip to the limit. So it was cheaper, and performance was only somewhat lower, but it was much hotter and used a lot of power —- so pretty useless for laptops.

On laptops AMD was indeed not very good; but their desktop CPUs – far more important in the 00s and early 10s than they are today – were pretty decent. That is not to say that Intel also didn't have good CPUs at the time, but (much) more expensive and for people just doing their browsing and occasional gaming on their desktop AMD was a solid (and cheaper!) choice IMO.

Intel is in an even better position now than last month, being handed $billions ($tens of billions?) of US tax dollars to fund building new fabs, which they would have had to build anyway. That will free up money to use in undercutting chip pricing, helping to bury AMD again.

Intel should realize at this point that their existential threat comes from TSMC, not AMD. AMD is one competitor, but TSMC is giving a huge boost to all of their competitors, particularly the ARM vendors who won’t just take some x86 market share but potentially destroy the entire x86 market at some point in the future.

Can't happen too soon for me.

Intel can build ARMs and RISC-Vs as well as anybody. Harder will be adapting their salespeople to non-monopoly conditions.

IIRC intel also builds some chips with TSMC.

Including their GPUs.

I have a laptop with the AMD 6900HS.

The CPU is great. It’s power envelope and performance feel amazing.

My biggest complaint is the there is a very limited selection of Laptops with AMD’s chips, especially the top tier. The one I bought required me to replace the Wifi/Bluetooth card (it came with a barely “supported” MediaTek one) for Linux.

I have loved Linux for a couple decades. It was a difficult decision to migrate to the M1. Linux is so much more responsive and pliable. However Asus encouraged me. After owning three of their laptops in the past 18 months that began to fall apart anywhere from 3-12 months-I was done. Unfortunately most 5/6900hs laptops are not flagship quality. Typically they are lower-mid range gaming units. This is my first mac. The build quality is exceptional. I will just say I was expecting a better experience from an OS built by a trillion dollar company.

Similar position. The existence of Asahi Linux convinced me to buy my first Mac, since it increased the odds that my M1 Air would be usable (to me) long-term.

I haven't made the switch yet as my old Lenovo is still hanging on. Would you mind expanding on your gripes with MacOS, in particular the comment about responsiveness?

Yeah, I'm also interested in responsiveness details.

I have my gripes with MacOS after years of linux/windows usage, but responsiveness on M1 is not one of them.

For me it is the little things. Like switching windows. Mac feels half a second slower then Linux and that delay make it feel less responsive. Opening up the terminal can iterm2 is another one. For me these things just adds up. I want my OS to get out of my way when I want to get work done.

I have turned off the genie effect and perhaps other animations, but my Ubuntu on my Lenovo still feels faster than the Mac.

I’m using the Zephyrus G14. I wouldn’t call the build quality bad.

It’s a more traditional style than a Unibody, sure. But it’s fine.

Razer 14"? Or Dell Alienware?

Lenovo's is the only one I find with 16" 3840x2400 OLED, but just a 6850, $2800. Or with 6950 but just 1920x1200, $2635. None with both. Advantage, Radeon R6500M GPU. Doesn't say which wifi it has.

https://www.lenovo.com/us/en/search?fq=&text=21D4000HUS

Dell has a 17" 6900HX, 4k, 32G RAM, RX6850 GPU, $2800. Or 6800H and RX6700, $2550. Mediatek MT7921 wifi...

https://www.dell.com/en-us/work/shop/dell-laptops/alienware-...

But I swore never to buy another Lenovo. Or Dell. Hoping I won't have to swear off ASUS too.

Zephyrus G14. I certainly wouldn’t swear off ASUS over it. After you upgrade the Wifi card (and, optionally, the SSD), it’s a great laptop; especially for Linux.

Which one did you get? I was looking at Linux laptops with this CPU, but the line-up is very limited.

Me too. I just gave up and bought an ASUS H5600QM with a 5900HX (and 3840x2400 OLED, 32G socketed RAM, 2 NVMe sockets, and 3 physical touchpad buttons). If you act fast, you can still buy the version with Windows 10 and a GTX 3070 at $1999, instead of Windows 11 and a GTX 3060 for $254 more.

Build quality is excellent, but the first one died after 2 days: charge light wouldn't even go on. Waiting for #2. Wish me luck!

ASUS Zephyrus G14.

Its really interesting with Intel on mobile platforms during the P4 era. Their P4 mobile chips were often terrible for temps and power use, but their Centrino/Pentium M platform was excellent despite being based on the PIII. The P4's architecture became a dead end, while the Pentium M's essentially continued to be improved, scaled up, and became the Core series.

If they had tried to force the P4 mobiles instead of rethinking and retooling the PIII core with some of the P4's FSB innovations and other things, they probably wouldn't of had as competitive mobile processors and maybe wouldn't have dethroned AMD a few years later.

My first laptop had one of those P4-based CPUs. They were super terrible chips. I don't think they were really even mobile chips. I think my battery was good for about 25-30 minutes tops. And Dell put in a soft cap of 768MB of memory. I was pretty pissed that none of this was ever noted when I bought the laptop.

The AMD offerings are still very far from the M1. Try comparing the 6800U to the now 2-year old M1 in Geekbench. The M2 widens the gap even more.

The Ryzen chips are already clocking over 3 GHz, so there isn't much more scaling from power left. That's why 5nm Zen4 probably won't move the needle too much.

Compared with the Phoronix Suite, on Linux, just today: https://www.phoronix.com/review/apple-m2-linux/15.

Surprising results. Definitely not in the "very far" range.

From your link: "Even under demanding multi-threaded workloads, the M2 MacBook Air was not nearly as warm as the other laptops tested"

Keep in mind the 6850U you're comparing against has a fan too. Notebookcheck says it has a 40W turbo on the gen 2 model, and the gen 3 Intel version has a 28W sustained boost. An M2 uses around 20W.

Also, a lot of those benchmarks are showing all x86 CPUs with a 3x+ lead, which indicates software optimization problems. Geekbench 5 is optimized for both arm64 and x86 and shows the M2 ahead of the 6800U. There are also just broken results like the LC0 test where the M1 is substantially faster than the M2. Overall, your results don't seem very valid.

You moved the discussion from performance to thermal/power very fast, guess you didn't like the benchmarks

If you want to talk benchmarks, you need to exclude all the ones where there is a clear software optimization problem.

> From your link: "Even under demanding multi-threaded workloads, the M2 MacBook Air was not nearly as warm as the other laptops tested"

> Overall, your results don't seem very valid.

They're not "my" results, and thermals were not part of the discussion.

Regarding performance, if one wants to be rigorous (and that's why I didn't state "68xx is faster than Mx"), one can't make absolute claims either way, as Torvalds himself has criticized Geekbench.

I still think that describing the performance difference as "not very far" is a valid assessment.

During the pentium4 era me and my friends all got mac laptops running powerpc. Our laptops could actually go on our laps without burning us and the powerbook versions were fast enough to emulate windows in a VM without feeling slow at all. My battery lasted quite a while for the time.

That is definitely not my experience. I used VirtualPC on a bunch of different PowerPC Macs. It was slow as balls on every single one I tried it on.

I agree, but than you have corporate compliance installing an insane amount of Spyware on your device so that a 2021 XPS 13 Dell with a gen 10 Intel is out of battery when only using word within the hour.

Fans spinning all the time and no way of disabling this madness.

Nearly the same for my Mac colleagues. They maybe get 2 hours out of their M1 MBPs unplugged.

Recently discovered that Infosec has now mandated that all laptops have sleep disabled (the reason given is to be able to do endpoint patching). ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

So I'm faced with having to log out and power off every day or suck up the cost of keeping the laptop on. /r/maliciouscompliance, here I come I suppose.

Tempted to get one of these: https://us.amazon.com/Vegamax-Button-Ethernet-Internet-Netwo...

Yeah, at a previous company, the IT team were complaining about users disabling powernap or shutting down laptops as it meant they wouldn't patch overnight.

But these laptops were in bags, the last thing I wanted was a mac to start a house fire by heating up in a bag, so fuck that.

Your infosec department doesn't know how to stage patches then and should be ashamed.

They should not be named "sec". It isn't security. It is compliance.

Probably because with work at home there’s no WOL.

We disabled sleep to improve battery life and address a personal safety issue. There are many failure scenarios between various builds of Windows 10 and shitty drivers. Devices often wake up in bags and spin up fans until dead.

Normal scenario is that the battery is dead in the morning. In one case, it melted the compartment material in a bag and was deemed a safety hazard.

So now instead all devices can keep their fans on and melt compartment material bag as nobody would assume the device is that dumb to not sleep when closed. Much better.

If it's a safety hazard, tell the OEM to repair the entire fleet.

Problem solved.

Takes awhile to bring back 20k laptops!

>So I'm faced with having to log out and power off every day

When did this become a chore? I do this as standard and imo all people should. SSD Boot times these days are mostly under a minute and you get a fresh desktop every time.

EDIT: In fact I am one of the sysadmins which so many seem to despise on here. I have hybrid sleep and fast startup disabled by group policy on all my windows domain networks. It reduces so many support tickets by just actually having machines properly rebooted every night. Without this, people contact IT for glitches and bugs in their system, and when you look at the system uptime it is years!

I don't care about boot times but I do care about keeping state.

In addition to the obvious browser I typically have an IDE, a few terminal windows, email, a few communication clients (due to internal and customer choices, not mine), and usually one or two database clients open at most times. Some of those restore their state nicely while others don't. Some of the terminal windows have e.g. a particular set of terminals at certain directories because I need to keep track of and work on multiple source repos at the same time.

Starting all of those from scratch every day would indeed be a chore. Perhaps more importantly, having my desktop be the way I left it also automatically reminds me what I was doing and helps continue from where I was.

A fresh desktop every morning would be a misfeature for me and would annoy and frustrate me immensely if forced on me.

I do of course reboot now and then for system updates etc., and I don't mind that.

There might be a decent rationale for forcing a reboot or disabling sleep on non-tech office devices if the staff are technically unskilled, but this is HN, so it's not much of a surprise if people aren't keen.

Seconded. My working state is crucial and keeps me on track. For someone with ADD, needing to overcome the inertia of setting up all my apps just the way I left them every single day would be catastrophic for my productivity. I refuse to reboot more than once a month, and only then if an OS update requires it.

The year is $CURRENT_YEAR, needing to reboot a system should be regarded as a last resort and a relic of the past. No matter how much effort you dump into making apps remember their state when they're closed, it will always be strictly inferior to just dumping RAM to disk.

Because I have visual studio open, a solution loaded and organized with all the files I need for this sprint, SSMS with the servers all connected that I need, all my tabs open to see my jira board, support tickets, etc, a notepad doc i was using to take notes on a phone call, my ssh key loaded into pageant, and if my computer reboots, i'm going to forget half of that when it starts back up and lose 30+ minutes trying to get set up again the next day.

edit: i would legitimately quit a company that made me reboot every single night.

In our network there are no developers. That would be a different usecase which would require different policies. All tools required by staff are online and autosave everything. This in fact is another reason why proper restarts are enforced nightly, as most browsers with multiple tabs of heavy web apps start misbehaving very quickly. Forcing a nightly shutdown of browsers is an added bonus of proper shutdowns.

Be aware I am in a corporate environment, with all non technical users, and all services online.

Ok - that makes sense. Obviously being on the dev side of things, I've never worked for a company that didn't have devs (and admins, devops, etc). Sounds like it definitely works in your case.

> I have hybrid sleep and fast startup disabled by group policy

I guess I'll have to add this to my questions to ask at job interviews. Admins like you these days sure try to make our lives as horrible as possible. Corporate anti-virus, DNS interception and policies like these turn my machine into something I constantly want to throw out the window.

All because you are too lazy to ask a person to reboot if the machine has high uptime.

Youve taken a lot of liberties and assumptions with my post here. I dont do any of those things you mentioned, only enforce a nightly shutdown.

Nothing to do with laziness. As other people have often mentioned on HN, in the real world of understaffed underbudget corporate IT you need to do what you can to enforce things which make everybodies life easier.

It does not make everybodys lives easier, it makes your life easier by easing the support burden at the cost of making the lives of those who have to live with those policies (marginally?) harder (or more annoying). It is quite a bold claim that those of us who do not shut down our laptops every night have no reason to do so, and you know better than us that it would come with no additional cost to us to do so.

It might very well be that it is preferable to the organization as a whole to sacrifice a bit of productivity everywhere for less burden on IT. But IMHO it should not be a decision which the IT department can make in isolation.

This is the part that people get wrong about all the ITIL metrics nonsense; they’re all designed by people who don’t have a background in science or experimentation and they never account for confounding factors. For instance, companies I’ve worked for in the past actually conducted rigorous studies of improving quality of life (as opposed to “fewer tickets==good”). They discovered that the number one cause of lower ticket volumes is Shadow IT! Because of course it is.

If you are disabling things by policy, it should be after a discourse with your users and a serious attempt at training. Being a GPO dictator is an anti-pattern.

Whatever makes you sleep better at night.

Policies such as yours are tremendously user hostile, and they are a reflection of the company's culture. I would probably not quit such a company, but I would certainly go rouge by either bringing my own equipment, or reinstalling the OS. If reprimanded, then I would quit.

"everybodies life easier"

I don't think this means what you think it means. I'm not a dev, but a mechanical engineer, and having to shutdown nightly, and reopen things the next morning, would cost the company at least an hour of my work time every week.

Upthread you can see why. High drama developers will tell you that logging out will cost the company $25k a year because previous snowflake has to open notepad and disrupt their flow as they eat breakfast.

The frontline IT guys aren’t able to deal with shit like that, so a draconian policy comes top down.

I treat each laptop reboot (regardless of reason) as an unexpected crash.

If the laptop crashes more than once a week, I simply won't use it. If I worked at your company, I'd just BYOD, and keep your garbage laptop in a drawer, only booting for compliancy crap (and certainly not leaving it on long enough to download updates).

I've actually done this at a previous job or two. It was fine. Both (large behemoth) companies ended up cratering, at least partially due to chasing away competent employees with boneheaded corporate policies.

I would. If there wasn't the teeny bit of SSO that means I can't access any relevant work software on a non endpoint managed machine.

Office? Gitlab? Jira? Confluence? Any code at all? Adobe Experience Cloud? Any Google Service? Adobe Creative Cloud? Our Time and Expenses Tooling?

All locked behind SSO with EPM enforced. Additionally nearly all internal resources are only accessible via VPN. And guess what - only usable on EPM devices.

When I started I received a device, SDD encrypted me being root. After being acquired by big corp we now are in compliance world. Parts of that would have come regardless of big corp due to client requirements.

But a lot of this is quite taxing.

Because it's not just system boot time that matters. After you do that you then have to launch half a dozen to a dozen applications that all have varying startup times, that will all randomly draw focus during their startup, and some will require you to do logins during all of that.

> When did this become a chore? I do this as standard and imo all people should.

Why should I? Not long ago, my laptop had uptime of over half a year.

[Edit: Oh, "windows domain networks"? I guess perhaps that explains your propensity for rebooting?]

I still can't believe they're able to disable "Hibernate", now "Sleep" is at risk? And of course with all the bloat booting takes forever.

Irony being, one of the biggest benefits for me of the M1 power consumption is that it can run quiet and smooth even with all the corporate spyware on there. It can even run MS teams along side that and docker too which also permanently consumers 100% of one core, while still staying completely silent.

It's crazy to think you have these opposing teams of engineers, the Apple ones working away to optimise like crazy to reduce power consumption and the compliance software teams thinking up new ways to profligately use more.

Sure, but running Docker and Teams will put an M1's CPU at 70c when a similar x86 Linux box would run it at ~40c. Maybe Apple's fan curves are to blame here, but I much prefer a Linux laptop for local dev.

Why is Docker's VM not idling?

Because macOS. It's not a container, it's a full on VM.

I run Docker on M1. Definitely idling. It must be one of the containers. Try running Docker stats to find out which.

unfortunately it does it even if I kill all the containers. It's a well known issue and they have been circling around with attempted fixes, regressions etc for a long time [1]

[1] https://github.com/docker/for-mac/issues/6166

I am writing this from a M1 MBP with screen at extra full brightness (using vivid) and I can say I get way more than 2 hours from it.

How much corporate garbage on it, though?

2 hours on a M1 is beyond corporate garbage. It's like they try to use as much power as possible, perhaps more than one process is stuck in an infinite loop.

Sounds like a shit EDR that's constantly scanning every file

First tool all files every hour. Virus scan on file change. Second tool scans also but I don't yet know the frequency.

Out of curiosity, and aside from Teams which I'm already sadly familiar with, what software is it that you're talking about? Company I work for was just bought by some megacorp, but I'm still using my own 2019 13" MBP for now.

Mcafee and VMware carbon black can fully consume a computer.

Ask your IT why they're not using JAMF Protect and maybe some light reporting like splunk.

Carbon Black probably needs some adjustments, or they need to spec laptops better. That sounds pretty intense and unnecessary.

IT is 300-600 people who report to no one in particular.

With those tools running, builds take over an hour if they complete at all. With the tools disabled, builds complete in under a minute.

Not OP, but here is one... checkpoint.com https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Check_Point

Horrid piece of software. I don't know when this sort of office-abuse became the norm but it makes me very sour about our industry as a whole.

My company has some McAfee and Palo Alto stuff and the cyvera cloud backup software which scans every file every 4 hours but then triggers the other software because of access attempts. Some of these are suites so its 3-4 diferent things (firewall, dlp, antivirus, ...)

> Palo Alto stuff

Fuck this company, one of my wife’s jobs is BYOD but requires GlobalProtect for their VPN. After the software has been running for a few hours, even disconnected, it just starts chewing CPU cycles and grinds her M1 MacBook to a halt.

The only way to terminate it is via `defaults write` command in the terminal. It’s basically malware.

Sometimes you can work around it and just use the native VPN or TunnelBlick. Did this at a previous corporate gig where the software they used wasn't even available for macs. Gotta be lucky though. By this I mean that usually VPN software just has a default config for some VPN protocol, and if you can find out what that is, you might be able to input the same config and credentials into the TunnelBlick or network settings

Symantec, Microsoft Defender (this shit is insane), Netskope and ZScaler

Msft defender on mac!?

Our macs get admin.

I sudo turn off the garbage and I haven’t been caught yet.

I have admin on my work Mac, but I'm not sure how to turn off the garbage. It's pretty annoying and definitely cuts down on my battery life significantly. Between that and Teams being a battery hog I might only get three hours out of what should be a whole-day machine.

Note that Cinebench R23 (the main CPU benchmark we use) runs for 10 minutes, so it’s a measure of sustained performance. Boost (PL2) is typically 30 seconds or less with a long period after that of staying at the PL1 limit.

Also note that Cinebench R23 is a terrible general purpose CPU benchmark. It uses Intel Embree engine which is hand optimized for x86. It heavily favors CPUs with many slow cores even though most people will benefit from CPUs with fewer, faster cores.

Cinebench is a great benchmark if you use Cinema4D, which I asumme 99.99% of the people buying these laptops won't use. Cinema4D is a niche of a niche.

Geekbench is far more representative of what kind of performance you can expect from a CPU.

https://reddit.com/r/hardware/comments/pitid6/eli5_why_does_...

> Geekbench is far more representative of what kind of performance you can expect from a CPU.

Geekbench is an even worse benchmark than cinebench. It's extremely heavily influenced by the underlying OS rather than the hardware being compared.

Cinebench 1T and mT at least actually benchmark the hardware.

Benchmark the hardware doing 3D rendering. Which is a pretty niche use case for most people that doesn’t correlate well with more common cpu-intensive tasks like gaming or video editing.

Video editing is just as niche as 3d rendering. But really neither are actually that niche, see for example https://www.blender.org/news/blender-by-the-numbers-2020/

And to put those blender numbers in comparison https://prodesigntools.com/number-of-creative-cloud-subscrib...

> It's extremely heavily influenced by the underlying OS rather than the hardware being compared.

How so?

To clarify, Cinebench correlates poorly with gaming, office software, web browsing, and video editing. Those are what the vast majority of people buying laptops will use it for.

For people that code, it also correlates poorly with parallel code compilation.

Anandtech benchmark puts Intel 12900K on top for both RISCV toolchain compilation and Cinebench.

12900K is the fastest x86 DIY CPU available. It'll be tops in nearly all benchmarks and applications.

You can say the same about gaming. It's tops in Cinebench and most games. Therefore Cinebench and gaming must have a high correlation? No.

Thanks for your input, this isn't said enough. So many CPU benchmarks aren't effective at evaluating the general use case and yet are held up as this golden standard

It's because Cinebench was disproportionately favoring the Zen architecture so AMD pushed it in marketing.

I agree that 12th gen can sustain good performance given decent cooling. However, the issue is still heat.

It could be fun to have a `lap benchmark`. That is can you keep a laptop on your lap while it runs Cinebench R23 for 10 minutes? With TB disabled, I can.

The wild thing is, your benchmarks with turbo boost disabled (GB5 single: 617 / multi: 5163) almost identically match the benchmarks on levono's new ARM laptop[1], the Thinkpad x13s (GB5 single: 1118 / multi: 5776). True, Windows on ARM will likely keep on being a pain for some time, but linux support seems to be coming[2], and for those of us that target Linux ARM development anyways, this is one of the first performant alternatives to post-arm Macbooks. Plus it has the killer feature: no fan, long lived battery life.

Another interesting ARM system is Nvidia's Jetson AGX Orin DevKit, which clocks in at (GB5: single: 763 / multi: 7193) [3]. That system is linux native right now, but of course isn't a laptop form factor.

[1]: https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/15575694 [2]: https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-5.20-SoCs-8cx-Gen3-Arm [3]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KrZt90c_-C8 (sorry for the video link)

If I'm not misreading what you wrote about the x13s, isn't it 2x the perf of the turbo-boost disabled i5-1240P in single core? That's a lot!

EDIT: Also confirmed that WSL2 runs natively on Win11 ARM. So you can have an optimized full Linux kernel running on the Thinkpad as well.

I mean, yeah, laptop CPUs will some times go like 3x slower without Turbo Boost. As others wrote, you can tune for battery life and keep it on.

> However, Intel 12th gen is only able to pull these impressive performance feats due to very high turbo boost clocks.

Don't forget 12th gen Intel CPUs have a lot more cores than 11th gen Intel CPUs. That's where the significant benchmark improvements are coming from. Unfortunately though, these often don't reflect the real world use case. Having more cores isn't going to improve the day-to-day performance very much. The new efficiency cores probably improve battery life though

Maybe the new efficiency cores improve battery life over the 11th gen Intel CPUs but they're still far from the battery life of AMD or Apple silicon CPUs

For sure.

I believe Intel 12th gen is not properly tweaked yet, currently the benchmarks show that the battery performance is worse with 12th gen than 12th gen. But if you 'limit' the chip and force the usage of the efficiency cores then you should be able to beat 11th gen.

Good to know ty!

You can usually use the "Xtreme Tuning Utility" (by Intel) to scale down without disabling turbo boost. I use it to scale my ~4.8 Ghz cores to 3.2 Ghz, so they can run without fans on my small form factor PC. 3.2 Ghz x 8 is enough to run most my favorite games.

Without TB, I'm down to 8x 2.4, which is a bit sluggish.

You may get better results by leaving the clock speed settings alone and adjusting the long-term power limits to an acceptable level. That way you won't sacrifice peak performance (ie. latency, especially with only one or two cores in use) but will still get most of the power savings.

I'll echo the concern about the turboboost really helping at times. Often, you have a single-threaded process running that benefits from a single core running at a higher clock rate for a short period of time and improves the experience tremendously.

How is 12th gen compared to 10th gen, in your experience? My XPS 13 on a 10th gen i7 just becomes absolute syrup on battery, even if I put it in high performance mode.

I have an XPS 17 with 12th gen and it drains around 50% battery per hour on a zoom call.

edit: My laptop has a i7-12700H, which uses more power than the cpu in the framework laptop.

More thoughts: The laptop is pretty much always plugged in. When I'm out I carry a little 60W charger with me.

However for other reasons I wouldn't recommend the XPS 17. I have a Lenovo legion 7 at home that I'm more happy with (cheaper, better performance, lots of ports, etc)

I had similar numbers on my i9 MBP.

Last week, on my M1 MBP, I spent an hour in a Teams (Electron!) call while off power and battery went from 99% to 96%.

Intel needs to match that to even be in the game for portables IMO.

The M1/M2 laptops are so above and beyond anything from AMD and Intel that it’s almost a joke. If Apple was really smart and had enough supply, it could drop the price down a couple of hundred dollars and completely take over the laptop market.

Price isn't the thing that keeps most people I know away from Macbooks (after all, it's the employers/business expense). I'm sure many people would like an M1 machine for the efficiency but the software is simply not ideal.

If they invested in contributing Linux drivers they'd probably be able to takeover the market for developers. Asahi is slowly improving, but it doesn't feel ready yet to be someone's sole daily machine.

Ultimately my M1 MBP sits on the shelf collecting dust, except for occasional testing. My smaller and lighter Intel laptop already gets 8 hours of battery life which is more than enough for me, and has perfect Linux support.

If they added some kind of Bootcamp for Developers, I'd switch to a MBP tomorrow.

And I just bought a maxed out XPS 13 Plus, which I generally like.

I suppose you mostly know ppl who run linux as their primary os then? Certainly in web dev all macs have been extremely popular.

As someone who uses Linux daily and generally dislikes macOS, I got all my Linux tools up and running on macOS, Docker runs well and many Linux things I run on an external cluster. So I am content.

The macOS UI is bit annoying and the fact that you have to install tiny apps like to have a separate trackpad and mouse scrolling direction is not ideal, but yeah it's all dwarfed by the fact I finally can't hear any fans and performance is just as good as plugged in. I can't remember when I last time had a laptop on a sofa without having to worry about the charger and getting laps uncomfortably hot.

You don’t need separate apps to set scrolling directions for the trackpad and external nice. It’s all in System Preferences.

They're separate tickboxes yes, but if you tick one it ticks the other.

At least it did when I still used macOS on portables. Now I only have a mini left for work

I just checked on my work Macbook, this is still correct and utterly stupid behaviour. 'Natural scroll direction' is global for all pointer devices. Internal, external trackpad and mouse.

The toggle bundles trackpad and scrolling setting in one - I want to have their "natural scroll direction" on trackpad and reverse on mice.

Scroll reverser allows you to set them up separately.

I've never used Linux daily, always macOS or osx, but all the same tooling probably day to day and the M series will be a no-brainer upgrade when it comes time. I would like some more colours that aren't super fingerprinty in the pro line though. Pretty bored of silver and grey

> The M1/M2 laptops are so above and beyond anything from AMD and Intel that it’s almost a joke.

This may have been true when the M1 was just released, but the gap both in performance and power consumption is shrinking. And that's with the competition still being one process node behind.

I assume the M1/M2 performance versions are much more expensive (very large L1/L2 caches, see Ryzen vs Ryzen X3D performance, and that only increases cheap L3 cache) than AMD processors. Apple can afford this I assume with high end laptop and their margins from owning the supply chain. Apple has the benefit of not telling and you can't buy an M1 (?). I would be interested about production costs of Ryzen vs. M1/M2 processors, any sources?

Also because I assume ARM needs less transistors compared to x86 so they can use more die area for caches.

If you look at die shots of any new chip, x86 or ARM, the actual CPU cores are taking up a smaller and smaller percentage of the die.

The rumored 15" MacBook Air may just do that. The base M2 chip is plenty fast and with the larger case they could put an even larger battery in and push battery life to 30+ hours.

It's already way cheaper than comparable windows machines

I recently turned down a m1 mba for $1100 in favour of a 2015 mba for $500. The keyboard is so dramatically better in the 2015 model, I couldn’t believe it. The battery is great, seems to last about 10h in a charge while writing and browsing and using discord.

I don’t care how fast it is as long as it continues to have those mediocre low travel keyboards. They’re better than their worst keyboards from the 2018 era but they still aren’t good

Why not just buy a keyboard (that's better than any laptop keyboard)? There are many benefits.

I always consider the built-in keyboard as a sort of emergency/convenience tool.

I’d rather have a portable device that doesn’t need a separate keyboard

I also have the XPS 17 with i7-12700H and 4K screen. I'm able to get 8-10 hours of work (compiling Rust, several docker containers on the run, at least a dozens tabs, etc...).

I'm on ArchLinux with a window manager and no desktop whatsoever. I also disabled the GPU. I wonder if there is something draining your battery on the background.

Thanks for the real-world numbers! This is good for my emotional state, as I've switched from Windows to a MB Pro solely because of the battery life and performance of the M1 Pro chip.

Zoom battery usage per hour should be a standard metric. Nothing kills a battery faster.

the one with a 17" 4K HDR touchscreen and RTX 3000 series? they will deplete the battery far quicker than the processor

We all wish intel could release a processor with similar power consumption to the m1, but it's not like they just overlooked battery life. x86 is just fundamentally not competitive with arm on that front, unfortunately. The only advantage it seems to have from an architecture standpoint is raw performance

They have the "intel atom" brand for low-power CPUs

As do I.

Meanwhile in a server, I'm starting to worry that as I work to flush performance issues out of the system, especially latency problems, that I won't see the sort of perf numbers I'm expecting because the fact that the machines are running well below 50% CPU utilization are likely to dogleg the moment it hits the thermal limits, and I have no way to predict that, short of maybe collecting CPU temperature telemetry. Not only might my changes not translate into 1:1 or even 1.2:1 gains, they might be zero gains and or just raise the CPU utilization.

Magical CPU utilization also takes away one of the useful metrics for autoscaling servers. Thermal throttling opens the door to outsized fishtailing scenarios.

Tested an i7 1260p recently and it ran like a beast. What's interesting is they have a discrete GPU now which is the Intel Arc that should take a lot of the load off the CPU.

What's wrong with fan noise? throw on headphones. If anything I wish my fans would go louder and harder. Nothing I hate more than a throttling laptop.

Same. I prefer that the manufacturer dictates to me how I use my end user Apple device as long as it has marginally better battery life.

intel's comet lake or whatever is pretty comparable to M1 imo

Ouch