No incentive. x86 users come to the table with a heatsink in one hand and a fan in the other, ready to consume some watts.
Ask HN: Why hasn't x86 caught up with Apple M series?
31–40 of 640 posts
Re: Ask HN: Why hasn't x86 caught up with Apple M series?
#32I considered getting a personal MBP (I have an M3 from work), but picked up a Framework 13 with the AMD 7 7840U. I have Pop!_OS on it, and while it isn't quite as impressive as the MBP, it is radically better than other Windows / Linux laptops I have used lately, battery life is quite good, ~5hr or so, not quite on par with the MBP but still good enough that I don't really have any complaints (and being able to up up…
Curious if the suspend / hibernate "just works" when you close the lid? I feel like I've tried several times to get this working in both Linux and Windows on various laptops and have never actually found a reliable solution (often resulting in having a hot and dead laptop in my backpack).
It does! The only thing wasn't working out of the box, so to speak, was the fingerprint reader, I had to do a little config to get it going.
Re: Ask HN: Why hasn't x86 caught up with Apple M series?
#33I may be out of date or wrong, but I recall when the M1 came out there was some claims that x86 could never catch up, because there is an instruction decoding bottleneck (instructions are all variable size), which the M1 does not have, or can do in parallel. Because of that bottleneck x86 needs to use other tricks to get speed and those run hot.
ARM instructions are fixed size, while x86 are variable. This makes a wide decoder fairly trivial for ARM, while it is complex and difficult for x86. However, this doesn't really hold up as the cause for the difference. The Zen4/5 chips, for example, source the vast majority of their instructions out of their uOp trace cache, where the instructions have already been decoded. This also saves power - even on ARM, decod…
When limited to 5 watts, the Ryzen HX 370 works pretty darn well. In some low-power user cases, my GPD Pocket 4 is more power efficient than my M3 MBA.
Re: Ask HN: Why hasn't x86 caught up with Apple M series?
#34Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not sure why you'd think that, comparing a heterogeneous core architecture to a homogeneous one. Mobile Ryzen chips aren't designed for power efficiency, if you want a "fair" comparison then pull up a Big.little x86 chip or benchmark Apple's performance cores vs AMD's mobile chipsets. Once you normalize for either efficiency cores or performance cores, you'll quickly realize that the node lead is the largest advantag…
I guess that’s the new excuse. Except it doesn’t work. I can off-line all the efficiency cores on my M1 laptop and still run circles around the new x86 stuff in performance per watt.
Well don't just tell me about it, show me. Link the Geekbench results when its done running.
Re: Ask HN: Why hasn't x86 caught up with Apple M series?
#35I considered getting a personal MBP (I have an M3 from work), but picked up a Framework 13 with the AMD 7 7840U. I have Pop!_OS on it, and while it isn't quite as impressive as the MBP, it is radically better than other Windows / Linux laptops I have used lately, battery life is quite good, ~5hr or so, not quite on par with the MBP but still good enough that I don't really have any complaints (and being able to up up…
I’m sure it’s great. As a layman there’s no way I’m running something called “Pop!_OS” versus Mac OS.
Meh, it's kind of a silly name, sure, but it's one of the few distros backed by an actual vendor (System76) who isn't just trying to sucker you into buying something. As a result it has a nice level of polish and function.
I like macOS fine, I have been using Macs since 1984 (though things like SIP grate).
Re: Ask HN: Why hasn't x86 caught up with Apple M series?
#36One downside of Framework is they use DDR instead of LPDDR. This means you can upgrade or replace the RAM, but it also means memory is much slower and more power hungry.
Its also probably worth putting the laptop in "efficiency" mode (15W sustained, 25W boost per Framework). The difference in performance should be fairly negligible compared to balanced mode for most tasks and it will use less energy.
Re: Ask HN: Why hasn't x86 caught up with Apple M series?
#37I considered getting a personal MBP (I have an M3 from work), but picked up a Framework 13 with the AMD 7 7840U. I have Pop!_OS on it, and while it isn't quite as impressive as the MBP, it is radically better than other Windows / Linux laptops I have used lately, battery life is quite good, ~5hr or so, not quite on par with the MBP but still good enough that I don't really have any complaints (and being able to up up…
I’m sure it’s great. As a layman there’s no way I’m running something called “Pop!_OS” versus Mac OS.
You're missing out. I've daily-driven both, modern macOS feels like a Fischer Price operating system by comparison.
Re: Ask HN: Why hasn't x86 caught up with Apple M series?
#38M1’s efficiency/thermals performance comes from having hardware-accelerated core system libraries. Imagine that you made an FPGA do x86 work, and then you wanted to optimize libopenssl, or libgl, or libc. Would you restrict yourself to only modifying the source code of the libraries but not the FPGA, or would you modify the processor to take advantage of new capabilities? For made-up example, when the iPhone 27 comes…
This isn't really true. Linux doesn't use any magic accelerators yet it runs very fast on Apple Silicon. It's just the best processor.
Re: Ask HN: Why hasn't x86 caught up with Apple M series?
#39[deleted]
Re: Ask HN: Why hasn't x86 caught up with Apple M series?
#40There is one positive to all of this. Finally, we can stop listening to people who keep saying that Apple Silicon is ahead of everyone else because they have access to better process. There are now chips on better processes than M1 that still deliver much worse performance per watt.
Go down the rabbit hole of broken compiler settings for debian default builds, if you want to see how much low-hanging fruit we still have. Who here would be interested in testing a distro like debian with builds optimized for the Framework devices?
Should .. should I install gentoo?