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Ask HN: Why hasn't x86 caught up with Apple M series?

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Re: Ask HN: Why hasn't x86 caught up with Apple M series?

#101

Post by ben-schaaf »

Battery efficiency comes from a million little optimizations in the technology stack, most of which comes down to using the CPU as little as possible. As such the instruction set architecture and process node aren't usually that important when it comes to your battery life.

If you fully load the CPU and calculate how much energy a AI340 needs to perform a fixed workload and compare that to a M1 you'll probably find similar results, but that only matters for your battery life if you're doing things like blender renders, big compiles or gaming.

Take for example this battery life gaming benchmark for an M1 Air: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jYSMfRKsmOU. 2.5 hours is about what you'd expect from an x86 laptop, possibly even worse than the fw13 you're comparing here. But turn down the settings so that the M1 CPU and GPU are mostly idle, and bam you get 10+ hours.

Another example would be a ~5 year old mobile qualcomm chip. It's a worse process node than an AMD AI340, much much slower and significantly worse performance per watt, and yet it barely gets hot and sips power.

All that to say: M1 is pretty fast, but the reason the battery life is better has to do with everything other than the CPU cores. That's what AMD and Intel are missing.

> If I open too many tabs in Chrome I can feel the bottom of the laptop getting hot, open a YouTube video and the fans will often spin up.

It's a fairly common issue on Linux to be missing hardware acceleration, especially for video decoding. I've had to enable gpu video decoding on my fw16 and haven't noticed the fans on youtube.

Re: Ask HN: Why hasn't x86 caught up with Apple M series?

#102

Post by dancek »

mmcnl wrote: post #87
hnaccountme wrote: post #68

Apple tailors their software to run optimally on their hardware. Other OSs have to work on a variety of platforms. Therefore limiting the amount of hardware specific optimizations.

No, it's not, it's absolutely the hardware. The vertical integration surely doesn't hurt, but third-party software runs very fast and efficient on M-series too, including Asahi Linux.

Does Asahi Linux now run efficiently? I tried it on M1 about two years ago. Battery life was maybe 30% of what you get on macOS.

Re: Ask HN: Why hasn't x86 caught up with Apple M series?

#103

Post by musicale »

pengaru wrote: post #22

My M1 Macbook Pro I used at work for several months until the Ubuntu Ryzen 7 7840U P14s w/32GB RAM arrived didn't seem particularly amazing. The only real annoying thing I've found with the P14s is the Crowdstrike junk killing battery life when it pins several cores at 100% for an hour. That never happened in MacOS. These are corporate managed devices I have no say in, and the Ubuntu flavor of the corporate malware i…

> That never happened in MacOS

Oh you've gotten lucky then. Or somehow disabled crowdstrike.

Re: Ask HN: Why hasn't x86 caught up with Apple M series?

#104

Post by aurareturn »

ZiiS wrote: post #96
aurareturn wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We are going to need to see some numbers for your claim. That’s not believable.

A 8.8" screen takes a lot less power.

When you say efficiency, I assume you’re factoring in performance of the device as well?

Maybe run Geekbench 6 and see.

Re: Ask HN: Why hasn't x86 caught up with Apple M series?

#106

Post by yalok »

mbreese wrote: post #80
baq wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can confirm, when developing software (a big project at $JOB) getting 3h out of a M3 MBP is a good day. IDE, build, test and crowdstrike are all quite power hungry.

I wonder how much of that is crowdstrike. At $LASTJOB my Mac was constantly chugging due to some mandated security software. Battery life on that computer was always horrible compared to a personal MB w/o it.

Exactly. Antiviruses are evil in this sense - crippling battery life significantly.

Wherever possible, I send “pkill -STOP” to all those processes, and stall them and thus save battery…

Re: Ask HN: Why hasn't x86 caught up with Apple M series?

#107

Post by purpleidea »

Honestly, I have serious FOMO about this. I am never going to run a Mac (or worse: Windows) I'm 100% on Linux, but I seriously hate it that I can't reliably work at a coffee shop for five hours. Not even doing that much other than some music, coding, and a few compiles of golang code.

My Apple friends get 12+ hrs of battery life. I really wish Lenovo+Fedora or whoever would get together and make that possible.

Re: Ask HN: Why hasn't x86 caught up with Apple M series?

#108

Post by tannhaeuser »

musicale wrote: post #93

> a number of Dockers containers running simultaneously and I never hear the fans, battery life has taken a bit of a hit but it is still very respectable. Note those docker containers are running in a linux VM! Of course they are on Windows (WSL2) as well.

Docker has got to be one of the worst energy consumption offenders given it's running on a heavy VM under a non-Linux OS for developers most of the time when people think it's lightweight. Doesn't help on the high performance side either, esp. ML. Might just be the wrong abstraction, and driven by "cloud vendors" for conveniently (for them!) farming overcomitted servers with ill-partitioned mostly-idle vibe "microservices."

Re: Ask HN: Why hasn't x86 caught up with Apple M series?

#109

Post by musicale »

alexjplant wrote: post #19
roscas wrote: post #4

RISC vs CISC. Why you think a mainframe is so fast? ARM is great. Those M are the only thing I could buy used and put Linux on it.

> RISC vs CISC. Why you think a mainframe is so fast? This hasn't been true for decades. Mainframes are fast because they have proprietary architectures that are purpose-built for high throughput and redundancy, not because they're RISC. The pre-eminent mainframe architecture these days (z/Architecture) is categorized as CISC. Processors are insanely complicated these days. Branch prediction, instruction decoding, mi…

> The pre-eminent mainframe architecture these days (z/Architecture) is categorized as CISC.

Very much so. It's largely a register-memory (and indeed memory-memory) rather than load-store architecture, and a direct descendant of the System/360 from 1964.

Re: Ask HN: Why hasn't x86 caught up with Apple M series?

#110

Post by throwup238 »

ben-schaaf wrote: post #101

Battery efficiency comes from a million little optimizations in the technology stack, most of which comes down to using the CPU as little as possible. As such the instruction set architecture and process node aren't usually that important when it comes to your battery life. If you fully load the CPU and calculate how much energy a AI340 needs to perform a fixed workload and compare that to a M1 you'll probably find s…

> All that to say: M1 is pretty fast, but the reason the battery life is better has to do with everything other than the CPU cores. That's what AMD and Intel are missing.

A good demonstration is the Android kernel. By far the biggest difference between it and the stock Linux kernel is power management. Many subsystems down to the process scheduler are modified and tuned to improve battery life.

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