Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

231–240 of 640 posts

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

#231

Post by nikanj »

pzo wrote: post #142
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.

And then Microsoft adds an animated news tracker to the left corner of the start bar, making sure the cpu never gets to idle.

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

#232

Post by KingOfCoders »

aurareturn wrote: post #223
KingOfCoders wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Someone has these two machines, and claims the x86 feels faster in his work. You don't own any of the machines but have "made" a comparison by copying data from the internet I assume. This is like explaining to someone who eats a sweet apple that the internet says the apple isn't sweet. MacBook Pro, 2TB, 32gb, 3200 EUR HP G1a, 2TB, 128gb, 3700 EUR If we don't compare laptops but mini-PCs, Evo X2, 2TB, 128gb, 2000 EUR…

You don't own any of the machines but have "made" a comparison by copying data from the internet I assume. This is like explaining to someone who eats a sweet apple that the internet says the apple isn't sweet. Yea, I never said he is wrong in his own experience. I was pointing out that the comparison is made between a base M4 and maxed out Ryzen. If we want to compare products in the same class, then use M4 Max. Mac…

I didn't "max out" the SSD, I chose an SSD to match the machine of the user.

You: "You're comparing the base M4 to a full fat Strix Halo that costs nearly $4,000."

Then

You: "A little disingenuous to max out on the SSD to make the Apple product look worse."

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

#233

Post by Fluorescence »

aurareturn wrote: post #73
DuckConference wrote: post #52

They're big, expensive chips with a focus on power efficiency. AMD and Intel's chips that are on the big and expensive side tend toward being optimized for higher power ranges, so they don't compete well on efficiency, while their more power efficient chips tend toward being optimized for size/cost. If you're willing to spend a bunch of die area (which directly translates into cost) you can get good numbers on the ot…

Per core, Apple’s Performance cores are no bigger than AMD’s Zen cores. So it’s a myth that they’re only fast and efficient because they are big. What makes Apple silicon chips big is they bolt on a fast GPU on it. If you include the die of a discrete GPU with an x86 chip, it’d be the same or bigger than M series. You can look at Intel’s Lunar Lake as an example where it’s physically bigger than an M4 but slower in C…

> Despite being ~1.5x bigger than the M4 Pro

Where are you getting M4 die sizes from?

It would hardly be surprising given the Max+ 395 has more, and on average, better cores fabbed with 5nm unlike the M4's 3nm. Die size is mostly GPU though.

Looking at some benchmarks:

> slightly more MT.

AMD's multicore passmark score is more than 40% higher.

https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/6345vs6403/Apple-M4-Pro...

> worse efficiency

The AMD is an older fab process and does not have P/E cores. What are you measuring?

> worse ST performance

The P/E design choice gives different trade-offs e.g. AMD has much higher average single core perf.

> worse GPU performance

The AMD GPU:

14.8 TFLOPS vs. M4 Pro 9.2 TFLOPS.

19% higher 3D Mark

34% higher GeekBench 6 OpenCL

Although a much crappier Blender score. I wonder what that's about.

https://nanoreview.net/en/gpu-compare/radeon-8060s-vs-apple-...

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

#234

Post by yaro330 »

aurareturn wrote: post #222
yaro330 wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Apple Silicon is 2-4x more efficient than AMD and Intel CPUs during load while also having higher top end speed. This is false, in cross platform tasks it's on par if not worse than latest X86 arches. As others pointed out: 2.5h in gaming is about what you'd expect from a similarly built X86 machine. They are willing due to lower idle and low load consumption, which they achieve by integrating everything as much as…

This is false, in cross platform tasks it's on par if not worse than latest X86 arches. This is Cinebench 2024, a cross platform application: https://imgur.com/a/yvpEpKF They are willing due to lower idle and low load consumption, which they achieve by integrating everything as much as possible - something that's basically impossible for AMD and Intel. Weird because LNL achieved similar idle wattage as Apple Silicon.…

> Weird because LNL achieved similar idle wattage as Apple Silicon.[0] Why do you say it's impossible?

And where is LNL now? How's the company that produced it? Even under Pat Gelsinger they said that LNL is a one off and they're not gonna make any more of them. It's commercially infeasible.

> Honestly not sure how your statement is relevant.

How is you bringing up synthetics relevant to race to idle?

Regardless, a number of things can be done on Strix Halo to improve the performance, first would be switching to some optimized Linux distro, or at least the kernel. That would claw back 5-20% depending on the task. It would also improve single core efficiency, I've seen my 7945hx drop from 14-15w idle on Windows to about 7-8 on Linux, because Windows likes to jerk off the CCDs non stop and throw the tasks around willy nilly which causes the second CCD and I/O die to never properly idle.

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

#235

Post by mbreese »

yalok wrote: post #106
mbreese wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The firewall on that computer killed the battery (with repeated crashing). It also refused to work with a USB Ethernet adapter so I could only use wifi. It was clearly a product meant to check a security box, written by a company that knew nothing about Macs, bought by Enterprise Windows admins. It was incredibly frustrating. (The next version of MacOS moved firewalls away from in-kernel to extensions. I like to think it was my repeated crash logs that made the difference.)

I half wonder if that’s part of the issue with Windows PCs and their battery life. The OS requires so much extra monitoring just to protect itself that it ends up affecting performance and battery life significantly. It wouldn’t be surprising to me if this alone was the major performance boost Macs have over Windows laptops.

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

#236

Post by Aissen »

TiredOfLife wrote: post #196
Aissen wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Framework does not have any design with those LPDDR packages.

https://frame.work/desktop?tab=specs "LPDDR5x-8000"

Ok, I was wrong. Didn't think of checking the desktop designs since it was a discussion on laptops.

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

#237

Post by aurareturn »

KingOfCoders wrote: post #232
aurareturn wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't own any of the machines but have "made" a comparison by copying data from the internet I assume. This is like explaining to someone who eats a sweet apple that the internet says the apple isn't sweet. Yea, I never said he is wrong in his own experience. I was pointing out that the comparison is made between a base M4 and maxed out Ryzen. If we want to compare products in the same class, then use M4 Max. Mac…

I didn't "max out" the SSD, I chose an SSD to match the machine of the user. You: "You're comparing the base M4 to a full fat Strix Halo that costs nearly $4,000." Then You: "A little disingenuous to max out on the SSD to make the Apple product look worse."

  I didn't "max out" the SSD, I chose an SSD to match the machine of the user.
Why don't you try to match in CPU speed, GPU speed, NPU speed, noise, battery life, etc? Why match SSD only?

That's why your post was disingenuous.

If it helps you focus on what the actual discussion, we are comparing maximum CPU and GPU speeds for the dollar. That's it.

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

#238

Post by akho »

gettingoverit wrote: post #220

> might be my Linux setup being inefficient Given that videos spin up those coolers, there is actually a problem with your GPU setup on Linux, and I expect there'd be an improvement if you managed to fix it. Another thing is that Chrome on Linux tends to consume exorbitant amount of power with all the background processes, inefficient rendering and disk IO, so updating it to one of the latest versions and enabling "m…

x12 and x6 do not seem plausible. Something is very wrong.

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

#239

Post by KingOfCoders »

aurareturn wrote: post #237
KingOfCoders wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't "max out" the SSD, I chose an SSD to match the machine of the user. You: "You're comparing the base M4 to a full fat Strix Halo that costs nearly $4,000." Then You: "A little disingenuous to max out on the SSD to make the Apple product look worse."

I didn't "max out" the SSD, I chose an SSD to match the machine of the user. Why don't you try to match in CPU speed, GPU speed, NPU speed, noise, battery life, etc? Why match SSD only? That's why your post was disingenuous. If it helps you focus on what the actual discussion, we are comparing maximum CPU and GPU speeds for the dollar. That's it.

Evo X2, 128gb, 2000 EUR

Max Studio, 128gb, 4400 EUR

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

#240

Post by aurareturn »

KingOfCoders wrote: post #210
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?

On one of the few workloads where massive parallelism makes sense, why quote a single threaded number? I'm curious.

To show in real numbers why people always say a Macbook always feels miles ahead of AMD and Intel in actual real world experience.

The primary reason is the ST speed (snappy feeling) and the efficiency (no noise, cool, long battery life).

It just so happens that Cinebench 2025 is the only power measurement metric I have available via Notebookcheck. If Notebookcheck did power measurements for GB6, I'd rather use that as it's a better CPU benchmark overall.

Cinebench 2025 is a decent benchmark but not perfect. It does a good enough job of demonstrating why the experience of using Apple Silicon is so much better. If we truly want to measure the CPU architecture like a professional, we would use SPEC and the measure power from the wall.

Post reply on HN