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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?

#301

Post by ziml77 »

Zanfa wrote: post #77
al_borland wrote: post #18

I’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…

Most manufacturers just don't give a shit. Had the exact same experience with a well-reviewed Acer laptop a while back, ended up getting rid of it a few months in because of constant annoyances, replaced with a MacBook Air that lasted for many years. A few years back, I got one of the popular Asus NUCs that came without networking drivers installed. I'm guessing those were on the CD that came with it, but not particu…

My venture outside of MacBooks included a Dell XPS. Supposed to be their high end, and that year's model was well reviewed by multiple sources.... yet I returned it after like a week. The fan would not only run far too often but the sound it made was also atrocious. I have no clue if mine was defective or if all the reviewers are deaf to high frequencies. And the body was so flimsy that I would grab the corner of the laptop to move it and end up triggering a mouse click.

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

#303

Post by BirAdam »

zipityzi wrote: post #284
BirAdam wrote: post #250

First, 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 RI…

This seems mostly misinformed. 1) Apple Silicon outperforms all laptop CPUs in the same power envelope on 1T on industry-standard tests: it's not predominantly due to "optimizing their software stack". SPECint, SPECfp, Geekbench, Cinebench, etc. all show major improvements. 2) x86 also heavily relies on micro-ops to greatly improve performance. This is not a "penalty" in any sense. 3) x86 is now six-wide, eight-wide,…

1. Apple’s optimizations are one point in their favor. XNU is good, and Apple’s memory management is excellent.

2. X86 micro-ops vs ARM decode are not equivalent. X86’s variable length instructions make the whole process far more complicated than it is on something like ARM. This is a penalty due to legacy design.

3. The OP was talking about M1. AFAIK, M4 is now 10-wide, and most x86 is 6-wide (Ryzen 5 does some weird stuff). X86 was 4-wide at the time of M1’s introduction.

4. M1 has over 600 reorder buffer registers… it’s significantly larger than competitors.

5. Close relative to x86 competitors.

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

#304

Post by devjab »

fafhnir wrote: post #201

I have the same experience here with my MacBook Air M1 from 2020 with 16GB RAM and 512GB SSD. After three years, I upgraded to a MacBook Pro with M3 Pro, 36GB of RAM, and 2TB of storage. I use this as my main machine with 2 displays attached via a TB4 dock. I'm working in IT and I get all new machines for our company over my desk to check them, and I observed the exact same points as the OP. The new machines are eith…

I'm still using my MacBook Air M1 with 8gb of Ram as my personal workhorse. It runs docker desktop and VSC better than my T14 whatever windows machine with 32gb ram. But that is windows and it has a bunch of enterprise stuff running. I assume it would work better with Linux, or even windows without whatever our IT does to control it.

With Nvidia Now I can even play games on it, though I wouldn't recommend it for any serious gamers.

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

#306

Post by ToucanLoucan »

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…

I honestly don't see myself ever leaving Macbooks at this point. It's the whole package: the battery life is insane, I've literally never had a dead laptop when I needed it no matter what I'm doing or where I'm at; it runs circles around every other computer I own, save for my beastly gaming PC; the stability and consistency of MacOS, and the underlying unix arch for a lot of tooling, all the way down to the build quality being damn near flawless save for the annoying lack of ports (though increasingly, I find myself needing ports less and less).

Like, would I prefer an older-style Macbook overall, with an integrated card reader, HDMI port, ethernet jack, all that? Yeah, sure. But to get that now I have to go to a PC laptop and there's so many compromises there. The battery life isn't even in the same zip code as a Mac, they're much heavier, the chips run hot even just doing web browsing let alone any actual work, and they CREAK. Like my god I don't remember the last time I had a Windows laptop open and it wasn't making all manner of creaks and groans and squeaks.

The last one would be solved I guess if you went for something super high end, or at least I hope it would be, but I dunno if I'm dropping $3k+ either way I'd just as soon stay with the Macbook.

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

#307

Post by [deleted] »

throwup238 wrote: post #110
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…

> 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.

[deleted]

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

#308

Post by fennecbutt »

ChrisGreenHeur wrote: post #294
brokencode wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Outsourced to who? The only companies with the engineers you’d need are the other CPU makers like Intel, AMD, Qualcomm, and Nvidia. And none of them make a CPU as efficient as Apple does.

Arm exists, it is unknown how much tech apple gets from Arm.

And tsmc (and therefore asml etc), usually apple reserves the newest upcoming node for their own production.

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

#310

Post by dagmx »

kangs wrote: post #136
dagmx wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That doesn’t really affect what I’m saying though. Yes, support capped out with the M2, but you can still observe the properties of efficiency on there.
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