ELI5: Why Apple's silicon consumption is so much better than AMD and Intel?

Re:ELI5: Why Apple's silicon consumption is so much better t... by loueed on Friday July 26, 2024 @05:54PM (#41082661)

Apple's chips are based on the ARM architecture, which is inherently more power-efficient than the x86 architecture used by AMD and Intel for their laptops. Apple also designs these chips in-house.

Apple is using a combination of high-performance and high-efficiency cores (Big.LITTLE architecture), allowing the chip to balance performance and power usage based on the task at hand. They also include dedicated hardware for specific tasks (like video encoding/decoding), which can be more efficient than performing these tasks on general-purpose cores.

AMD and Intel design chips for a wide range of devices and systems, requiring a more generic approach. This limits their ability to optimise for specific hardware and software combinations. Apple designs chips solely for its own products, allowing for tighter integration between chip, hardware, and software.

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Re:ELI5: Why Apple's silicon consumption is so much better t... by kwanbix on Saturday July 27, 2024 @03:29AM (#41085007)

I understand that Apple controls much more its ecosystem than either AMD or Intel, but I cannot imagine a M1/2/3 being less "generic" than an AMD/Intel, care to elaborate?

Also, the question is what makes the architecture more power hungry. Originally there was this disctinction of CISC (intel/amd) vs RISC (arm/apple) but my understanding is that at least intel/amd have some cisc runnning on risc architecture, meaning, externally it looks like a cisc/x64, but internally is a risc or riscish.

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