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A comment on Tell HN: The ThinkPad X1 Carbon is an excellent MacBook replacement. Parent comment

Re:Tell HN: The ThinkPad X1 Carbon is an excellent MacBook r... by smoldesu on Sunday December 04, 2022 @03:43PM (#33857677)
Not really. Apple Silicon has good battery life, but it's performance is actually fairly pathetic compared to last-gen x86 chips. Like, compare the M1 to the Ryzen 7 4800u, a chip that was like 9 months old when Apple Silicon hit shelves. Both processors have competitive single-core and multi-core performance, and the GPUs are even pretty close in terms of performance profile. The real kicker? AMD's chip put up competitive performance on TSMC's 7nm node, whereas Apple was fighting with 5nm.

Honestly, if AMD had access to the same silicon Apple does, there probably wouldn't be any comparison. I'd argue their processes are half a generation ahead of Apple's designs.

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Re:Tell HN: The ThinkPad X1 Carbon is an excellent MacBook r... by diroussel on Sunday December 04, 2022 @03:57PM (#33857797)
That’s just peak performance, and ignoring the energy efficiency.
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Re:Tell HN: The ThinkPad X1 Carbon is an excellent MacBook r... by smoldesu on Sunday December 04, 2022 @03:59PM (#33857820)
So, compare the power efficency. M1 idles at ~6w + 2-5 watts for the display. The 4800u idles ~10w + 2-4 watts for the display. A simple node bump would close the efficiency gap between the two chips, at least on paper.
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Re:Tell HN: The ThinkPad X1 Carbon is an excellent MacBook r... by dagmx on Sunday December 04, 2022 @05:04PM (#33858446)
Unless you’re comparing perf per watt as a curve, idle wattage is largely not representative of real world use. Similarly for peak performance if you’re excluding the wattage or throttling at those levels.
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Re:Tell HN: The ThinkPad X1 Carbon is an excellent MacBook r... by smoldesu on Sunday December 04, 2022 @05:16PM (#33858545)
It's impossible to compare either of these CPUs because one is heterogeneous and the other is big.LITTLE. It's still fair to analyze their power consumption as a black-box machine though.
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Re:Tell HN: The ThinkPad X1 Carbon is an excellent MacBook r... by dagmx on Sunday December 04, 2022 @05:19PM (#33858580)
That’s true though from a user perspective, the PpW of the package is more important than the actual core.

Though of course there are other comparison issues like the ANE and video decoders making certain tasks significantly more efficient, so testing the whole package does become much more complex to represent.

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