I first thought it was sarcasm. (Like someone who says: "the main thing I like about iPhones is their single core performance")

I briefly thought that. Then posted my comment anyways and.. wasn’t disappointed. Lol

don't take random internet people's saying at face value, some folks state 1000 things a day of which maybe 5 are still valid tomorrow

Most systems have similar IO, OS, runtimes. It makes sense for folks to be primarily concerned with Watts per MIPS.

me too, I love my 2019 Intel MBP, it keeps me warm in the evenings.

Yes, as computers don't really get faster anymore, and I travel all the time (right now writing this from a hotel restaurant), the biggest change I notice is in battery time, which depends on energy efficiency improvements that usually come with process node change. I'm not being sarcastic.

The M-series is way faster than previous generations even in single treaded general purpose code. “Computers don’t get faster anymore” was Intel’s inability to innovate for many years, not an inevitability of physics. We will reach the end of Moore's law someday, but it’s not there yet.

Computers get faster in benchmarks. If anything, regular computer tasks like checking your email or editing a file has more latency than 5 years ago. Software bloats to fill whatever container you put it in.

If you use the proper software, it doesn’t. Vim is still as fast as it was 40 years ago if not faster. IO is also getting a lot faster. The SSDs these days are what RAM used to be.

Software gets slower faster than computers get faster.

Why then don’t you say

“I generally care about battery life as the main feature of a computer.”

?

I trust more TSMC process numbers (for large changes, not the 4nm bulls*t) more than battery life published by a PR/marketing team for my buying decisions. They are much harder to fake. And sure, performance/watt is what matters generally, which is again hard to compare between brands and marketing teams.

Even then, I would say you care about battery life and performance/Watt, and think process node a better proxy for them than what manufacturers and reviews say about them.

>Yes, as computers don't really get faster anymore

This was true from the late 2000s to about 2017 but in the last four years or so computers have gotten much, much faster.

Obviously, it is workload dependent. If all you use is a web browser then you may not notice. If you use a computer for any sort of parallelizable processing work the last four years have been transformative.

For workstations, performance has doubled in single-threaded applications since 2019 and since more cores are standard you can see up to a 10x increase in performance. For servers the performance improvement is even greater.

I do synthetic aperture radar processing and image generation and can get through 10x the amount of data in a day than I could in 2019. That's just CPU stuff, for GPU stuff it's even more-- I can do stuff now that was impossible in 2019 due to VRAM limitations.

There have also been specialized accelerations included in CPUs like the JavaScript optimizations Apple baked into the M1, which definitely do make a noticeable difference if all you use a computer for is web browsing.

Yes. TSMC 5nm was incredible. Everything fabbed on TSMC 5nm/4nm has seen a huge generational leap in performance and energy efficiency after years of relative stagnation. It directly improves single-threaded performance and battery life which are two of the absolute most important metrics for user perceived performance.

Process node is HUGE here. M2 is pretty close to just M1 with higher clocks and higher power consumption. This is largely because they didn't get to add transistors.

The N3 shrink doesn't help SRAM one bit, but it does give them more room to improve the CPU.

Caches are important, caches are mostly a question of the transistor wizards (between paradigm shifts at least)