161–170 of 640 posts
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…
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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 t…
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You can, the thing is you have to build it out of a solid piece of metal. Either that's patented by Apple or it is too expensive for x86 system builders.
If I recall correctly Apple had to buy enormous numbers of CNC machines in order to build laptops that way. It was considered insane by the industry at the time.
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…
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You can, the thing is you have to build it out of a solid piece of metal. Either that's patented by Apple or it is too expensive for x86 system builders.
If I recall correctly Apple had to buy enormous numbers of CNC machines in order to build laptops that way. It was considered insane by the industry at the time.
Apple, unlike a lot, if not all large companies (who are run by MBA beancounter morons), holds insanely large amounts of cash. That is how they can go and buy up entire markets of vendors - CNC mills, TSMC's entire production capacity for a year or two, specialized drills, god knows what else.
They effectively price out all potential competitors at once for years at a time. Even if Microsoft or Samsung would want to compete with Apple and make their own full aluminium cases, LED microdots or whatever - they could not because Apple bought exclusivity rights to the machines necessary.
Of course, there's nothing stopping Microsoft or Samsung to do the same in theory... the problem these companies have is that building the war chest necessary would drag down their stonk price way too much.
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This argument never passes the sniff test. You can run Linux on a MacBook Pro and get similar power efficiency. Or run third party apps on macOS and similarly get good efficiency.
unfortunately, contrarily to popular belief, you cannot run Linux natively on recent macbooks (m4) today.
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.
Apple Silicon is 2-4x more efficient than AMD and Intel CPUs during load while also having higher top end speed.
Another thing that makes Apple laptops feel way more efficient is that they use a true big.Little design while AMD and Intel's little cores are actually designed for area efficiency and not power efficiency. In the case of Intel, they stuff as many little cores as possible to win MT benchmarks. In real world applications, the little cores are next to useless because most applications prefer a few fast cores over many slow cores.
I think the Ryzen ai max 395+ gets really close in terms of performance per watt.
In single threaded CPU performance, M4 Pro is roughly 3.6x more efficient while also being 50% faster.
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> crowdstrike It is incredible that crowdstrike is still operating as a business. It is also hard to understand why companies continue to deploy shoddy, malware-like "security" software that decreases reliability while increasing the attack surface. Basically you need another laptop just to run the "security" software.
Allegedly, crowdstrike is S-tier EDR. Can’t blame security folks to want to have it. The performance and battery tax is very real though.
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> 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?
Macs today are not designed to be easily repairably but instead to be lighter and otherwise better integrated - I believe that is consequence of consumer preferences and not shady business practices. As for the services - it is a bit off topic as I believe Apple makes a profit on their macs alone ignoring their services business. But in general I have less of a problem with a subscription / fee-driven services busine…
What i am saying is that Apple could for sure fit replaceable drives without any change hit to size or weight. But their Mac strategy is price based on disk size and make repairs expensive so you buy new machine. I don't complain it is the reason why cheapest Macbook Air is the best laptop deal.
But let's stop this marketing story that it's their engineering genius not their market strategy.