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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?

#141

Post by john01dav »

qcnguy wrote: post #137
throwup238 wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

And the more relevant case for laptops is macOS, which is heavily optimized for battery life and power draw in ways that Linux just isn't, neither is Windows. A lot of the problems here can't actually be fixed by intel, amd, or anyone designing x86 laptops because getting that level of efficiency requires the ability to strongly lead the app developer community. It also requires highly competent operating system deve…

Power efficiency is very important to servers too, for cost instead of for battery life. But, energy is energy. Thus, I suspect that the power draw is in userland systems that are specific to desktop, like desktop environments. Thus, using a simpler desktop environment may be worthwhile.

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

#142

Post by pzo »

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…

> most of which comes down to using the CPU as little as possible.

it least on mobile platform apple advocate the other way with race to sleep - do calculation as fast as you can with powerful cores so that whole chip can go back to sleep earlier and more often take naps.

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

#143

Post by Rohansi »

mschuster91 wrote: post #129

> I am sorely disappointed, using the Framework feels like using an older Intel based Mac. 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. A big thing is storage. Apple uses extremely fast storage directly attached to the SoC and physically very very close. In contrast, most x86 systems use storage that's socketed (which adds phy…

> A big thing is storage. Apple uses extremely fast storage directly attached to the SoC and physically very very close. In contrast, most x86 systems use storage that's socketed (which adds physical signal runtime) and that goes via another chip (southbridge).

Why would PCIe SSDs need to go through a southbridge? The CPU itself provides PCIe lanes that can be used directly.

> That means, unlike Mac devices that can use storage as swap without much practical impact, x86 devices have a serious performance penalty.

Swap is slow on all hardware. No SSD comes close to the speed of RAM - not even Apple's. Latency is also significantly worse when you trigger a page fault and then need to wait for the page to load from disk before the thread can resume execution.

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

#144

Post by john01dav »

chvid wrote: post #83

I don't think there is a single thing you can point to. But overall Apple's hardware/software is highly optimized, closely knit, and each component is in general the best the industry has to offer. It is sold cheap as they make money on volume and an optimized supply chain. Framework does not have the volume, it is optimized for modularity, and the software is not as optimized for the hardware. As a general purpose c…

> It is sold cheap as they make money on volume and an optimized supply chain.

What about all the money that they make from abusive practices like refusing to integrate with competitors' products thus forcing you to buy their ecosystem, phoning home to run any app, high app store fees even on Mac OS, and their massive anti repair shenanigans?

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

#145

Post by pharrington »

I don't know, but I suspect the builds of the programs you're using play a huge factor in this. Depending on the Linux distro and package management you're using, you just might not be getting programs that are compiled with the latest x86_64 optimizations.

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

#146

Post by socalgal2 »

dlcarrier wrote: post #132

That's a Chrome problem, especially on extra powerful processors like Strix Halo. Apple is very strict about power consumption in the development of Safari, but Chrome is designed to make use of all unallocated resources. This works great on a desktop computer, making it faster than Safari, but the difference isn't that significant and it results in a lot of power draw on mobile platforms. Many simple web sites will…

AFAICT the comparisons to safari are no longer true

https://birchtree.me/blog/everyone-says-chrome-devastates-ma...

That might be different on other platforms

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

#147

Post by RachelF »

PaulKeeble wrote: post #60

I tend to think its putting the memory on the package. Putting the memory on the package has given the M1 over 400GB/s which is a good 4x that on a usual dual channel x64 CPU and the latency is half that of going out to a DRAM slot. That is drastic and I remember when the northbrige was first folded into the CPU by AMD with the Athlon and it had a similarly big improvements in performance. It also reduces power consu…

A small reason for less power consumption with on die RAM is that you don't need active termination, which does use a few watts of power. It isn't the main reason that the Macs use less power, though.

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

#148

Post by nicolaslem »

kangs wrote: post #125
aurareturn wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On Cinebench 2025 single threaded, M4 is roughly 4x more efficient and 50% faster than Strix Halo. These numbers can be verified by googling Notebookcheck. How many iterations to match Apple?

yes and no. i have macbook pro m4 and a zbook g1a (ai max 395+ ie strix halo) In day to day usage the strix halo is significantly faster, and especially when large context LLM and games are used - but also typical stuff like Lightroom (gpu heavy) etc. on the flip side the m4 battery life is significantly longer (but also the mpb is approx 1/4 heavier) for what its worth i also have a t14 with a snapdragon X elite and…

I also have a Strix Halo zbook G1A and I am quite disappointed in the idle power consumption as it hovers around 8W.

Adding to that, it is very picky about which power brick it accepts (not every 140W PD compliant works) and the one that comes with the laptop is bulky and heavy. I am used to plugging my laptop into whatever USB-C PD adapter is around, down to 20W phone chargers. Having the zbook refuse to charge on them is a big downgrade for me.

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

#149

Post by chrismorgan »

BlindEyeHalo wrote: post #112
mmcnl wrote: post #92

A lot of insightful comments already, but there are two other tricks I think Apple is using: (1) the laptops can get really hot before the fans turn on audibly and (2) the fans are engineered to be super quiet. So even if they run on low RPM, you won't hear them. This makes the M-series seem even more efficient than they are. Also, especially the MacBook Pros have really large batteries, on average larger than the co…

The macbook air doesn't even have a fan. I don't think you could built a fan-less x86 laptop.

> I don't think you could built a fan-less x86 laptop.

Sure you can, they’re readily available on the market, though not especially common.

But even performance laptops can often be run without spinning their fans up at all. Right now, the ambient temperature where I live is around 28°, and my four-year-old Ryzen 5800HS laptop hasn’t used its fan all day, though for a lot of that time it will have been helped by a ceiling fan. But even away from a fan for the last half hour, it sits in my lap only warm, not hot. It’s easy enough to give it a load it’ll need to spin the fan up for, but you can also limit it so it will never need its fan. (In summer when the ambient temperature is 10°C higher every day, you’ll want to use its fan even when idling, and it’ll be hard to convince it not to spin them up.)

x86-64 devices that are don’t even have fans won’t ever have such powerful CPUs, and historically have always been very underpowered. Like only 60% of my 5800HS’s single-threaded benchmarking and only 20% of its multithreaded. But at under 20% of the peak power consumption.

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

#150

Post by prmoustache »

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…

> It's a fairly common issue on Linux to be missing hardware acceleration, especially for video decoding.

To be fair, usually the linux itself has hardware acceleration available but the browser vendors tend to disable gpu rendering except on controlled/known perfectly working combinations of OS/Hardware/Drivers and they have much less testing in Linux. In most case you can force enabling gpu rendering in about:config and try it out yourself and leave it unless you get recurring crashes.

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