I don't think a fan spinning is negative. The cooling is functioning effectively.
Apple often lets the device throttle before it turns on the fans for "better ux" linux plays no such mind games.
Ask HN: Why hasn't x86 caught up with Apple M series?
241–250 of 640 posts
Re: Ask HN: Why hasn't x86 caught up with Apple M series?
#242Battery 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…
Hell, Apple CPU's are even optimized for Apple software GC calls like Retain/Release objects. It seems if you want optimal performance and power efficiency, you need to own both hardware and software. Looks like general purpose CPUs are on the losing train. Maybe Intel should invent desktop+mobile OS and design bespoke chips for those.
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Re: Ask HN: Why hasn't x86 caught up with Apple M series?
#243> I haven’t tried Windows on the Framework yet it might be my Linux setup being inefficient.
My experience has been to the contrary. Moving to Linux a couple months ago from Windows doubled my battery life and killed almost all the fan noise.
Re: Ask HN: Why hasn't x86 caught up with Apple M series?
#244Battery 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…
Which also should mean that using that M1 machine with Linux will have Intel/AMD like experience, not the M1 with macOS experience.
Re: Ask HN: Why hasn't x86 caught up with Apple M series?
#245> 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.
My CPU is at over 5GHz, 1% load and 70C at the moment. That's in a "power-saving mode".
If nothing would be wrong, it'd be at something like 1.5GHz with most of the cores unpowered.
Re: Ask HN: Why hasn't x86 caught up with Apple M series?
#246I’ve been thinking a lot about getting something from Framework, as I like their ethos around relatability. However, I currently have an M1 Pro which works just fine, so I’ve been kicking the can down the road while worrying that it just won’t be up to par in terms of what I’m used to from Apple. Not just the processor, but everything. Even in the Intel Mac days, I ended up buying a Asus Zephyrus G14, which had nothi…
I recently upgraded from an M1 mac book pro 15", which I was pretty happy with, to the M4 max pro 16". I've been extremely impressed with the new laptop. The key metric I use to judge performance is build speed for our main project. It's a thing I do a few dozen times per day. The M1 took about four minutes to run our integration tests. I should add that those tests run in parallel and make heavy use of docker. There…
The M4 was the first chip that tempted me to upgrade from the M1, which I think is the case for most people. At work, I’m at the mercy of the corporate lease. My personal Mac doesn’t get used in a way where I’ll see a major change, so I’m giving it a while longer.
I’ve actually been debating moving from the Pro to the Air. The M4 is about on par with the M1 Pro for a lot of things. But it’s not that much smaller, so I’d be getting a lateral performance move and losing ports, so I’m going to wait and see what the future holds.
Re: Ask HN: Why hasn't x86 caught up with Apple M series?
#247There's a lot of trash talking of x86 here but I feel like it's not x86 or Intel/AMD that are the problem for the simple reason that Chromebooks exist. If you've ever used a Chromebook with the Linux VM turned on, they can basically run everything you can run in Linux, don't get hot unless you actually run something demanding, have very good idle power usage, and actually sleep properly. All this while running on the same i5 that would overheat and fail to sleep in Windows / default Linux distros. This means that it is very much possible to have an x86 get similar runtimes and heat output as an M Series Mac, you just need two things:
- A properly written firmware. All Chromebooks are required to use Coreboot and have very strict requirements on the quality of the implementation set by Google. Windows laptops don't have that and very often have very annoying firmware problems, even in the best cases like Thinkpads and Frameworks. Even on samples from those good brands, just the s0ix self-tester has personally given me glaring failures in basic firmware capabilities.
- A properly tuned kernel and OS. ChromeOS is Gentoo under the hood and every core service is afaik recompiled for the CPU architecture with as many optimisations enabled. I'm pretty sure that the kernel is also tweaked for battery life and desktop usage. Default installations of popular distros will struggle to support this because they come pre-compiled and they need to support devices other than ultrabooks.
Unfortunately, it seems like Google is abandoning the project altogether, seeing as they're dropping Steam support and merging ChromeOS into Android. I wish they'd instead make another Pixelbook, work with Adobe and other professional software companies to make their software compatible with Proton + Wine, and we'd have a real competitor to the M1 Macbook Air, which nothing outside of Apple can match still.
Re: Ask HN: Why hasn't x86 caught up with Apple M series?
#248Cinebench points per Watt according to a recent c't CPU comparison [1]:
Apple M1: 23.3
Apple M4: 28.8
Ryzen 9 7950X3D (from 2023, best x86): 10.6
The Apple CPUs also beat most of the respective same-year x86 CPUs in Cinebench single-thread performance.
[1] https://www.heise.de/tests/Ueber-50-Desktop-CPUs-im-Performa... (paywalled, an older version is at https://www.heise.de/select/ct/2023/14/2307513222218136903#&...)
Re: Ask HN: Why hasn't x86 caught up with Apple M series?
#249Earlier 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.…
This is Cinebench 2025, a cross platform application: https://imgur.com/a/yvpEpKF
You sure like that table, don't you? Trying to find the source of that blender numbers, I came across many reddit posts of you with that exact same table. Sadly those also don't have a source - the are not from the notebookcheck source.
Re: Ask HN: Why hasn't x86 caught up with Apple M series?
#250First, Apple did an excellent job optimizing their software stack for their hardware. This is something that few companies have the ability to do as they target a wide array of hardware. This is even more impressive given the scale of Apple's hardware. The same kernel runs on a Watch and a Mac Studio.
Second, the x86 platform has a lot of legacy, and each operation on x86 is translated from an x86 instruction into RISC-like micro-ops. This is an inherent penalty that Apple doesn't have pay, and it is also why Rosetta 2 can achieve "near native" x86 performance; both platform translate the x86 instructions.
Third, there are some architectural differences even if the instruction decoding steps are removed from the discussion. Apple Silicon has a huge out-of-order buffer, and it's 8-wide vs x86 4-wide. From there, the actual logic is different, the design is different, and the packaging is different. AMD's Ryzen AI Max 300 series does get close to Apple by using many of the same techniques like unified memory and tossing everything onto the package, where it does lose is due to all of the other differences.
In the end, if people want crazy efficiency Apple is a great answer and delivers solid performance. If people want the absolute highest performance, then something like Ryzen Threadripper, EPYC, or even the higher-end consumer AMD chips are great choices.