I was about to say it might be windows and use linux, since perf benchmarks on windows can be far worse for the same chip than linux, but you are using linux already.
Ask HN: Why hasn't x86 caught up with Apple M series?
411–420 of 640 posts
Re: Ask HN: Why hasn't x86 caught up with Apple M series?
#412> Why haven’t AMD/Intel been able to catch up? Is x86 just not able to keep up with the ARM architecture? When can we expect a x86 laptop chip to match the M1 in efficiency/thermals?! AMD kind of has, the "Max 395+" is (within 5% margin or so) pretty close to M4 Pro, on both performance and energy use. (it's in the 'Framework Desktop', for example, but not in their laptop lineup yet) AMD/Intel hasn't surpassed Apple…
The AI just made it to their laptop lineup today. The Framework 16 has either the AMD Ryzen™ AI 9 HX 370 or the AI 7 350.
Re: Ask HN: Why hasn't x86 caught up with Apple M series?
#413Earlier quoted context omitted.
A huge reason for the low power usage is the iPhone. Apple spent years incrementally improving efficiency and performance of their chips for phones. Intel and AMD were more desktop based so power efficiency wasnt the goal. When Apple's chips got so good they could transition into laptops, x86 wasn't in the same ballpark. Also the iPhone is the most lucrative product of all time (I think) and Apple poured a tonne of t…
> and Apple poured a tonne of that money into R&D and taking the top engineers from Intel, AMD, and ARM, building one of the best silicon teams. how much silicon did Apple actually create? I thought they outsourced all the components?
Besides Apple's SoCs they also have made dedicated silicon for secure enclaves, wifi, bluetooth, ultra-wideband, and cellular radios, and motion coprocessors.
Re: Ask HN: Why hasn't x86 caught up with Apple M series?
#414I 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…
> Well, your mileage may vary, but IMHO there is no alternative to a Mac nowadays, even if you want to use Linux or Windows.
I guess I'd slightly change that to "MacBook" or similar, as Apple are top-in-class when it comes to laptops, but for desktop they seem to not even be in the fight anymore, unless reducing power consumption is your top concern. But if you're aiming for "performance per money spent", there isn't really any alternative to non-Apple hardware.
I do agree they do the best hardware in terms of feeling though, which is important for laptops. But computing is so much larger than laptops, especially if you're always working in the same place everyday (like me).
Re: Ask HN: Why hasn't x86 caught up with Apple M series?
#415Battery 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 once saw a high resolution CPU graph of a video playing in Safari. It was completely dead except for a blip every 1/30th of a second. Incredible discipline. The Chrome graph in comparison was a mess.
Safari team explicitly targets perf as a target. I just wish they weren't so bad about extensions and adblock and I'd use it as my daily driver. But those paper cuts make me go back to chromium browsers all the time.
Re: Ask HN: Why hasn't x86 caught up with Apple M series?
#416There’s a number of reasons, all of which in concert create the appearance of a performance gap between the two: * Apple has had decades optimizing its software and hardware stacks to the demands of its majority users, whereas Intel and AMD have to optimize for a much broader scope of use cases. * Apple was willing to throw out legacy support on a regular basis. Intel and AMD, by comparison, are still expected to run…
I don't think backcompat is that big of a deal, since old DOS programs also don't take any compute power to run too and apple has shown layers like rosetta work fine.
Re: Ask HN: Why hasn't x86 caught up with Apple M series?
#417Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
They even decided to make me lie — twice, on the same day with their latest announcement: https://frame.work/ro/en/laptop16?tab=whats-new
Re: Ask HN: Why hasn't x86 caught up with Apple M series?
#418Earlier quoted context omitted.
If x86 just officially said “we’re cutting off 32-bit legacy” one day (similar to how Apple did), they could toss out 95% of the crap that makes them power inefficient. Just think of the difference dropping A10 offered for memory efficiency. “Modern Standby” could be made to actually work, ACPI states could be fixed, a functional wake-up state built anew, etc. Hell, while it would allow pared down CPUs, you could hav…
>If x86 just officially said “we’re cutting off 32-bit legacy” one day (similar to how Apple did), they could toss out 95% of the crap that makes them power inefficient. Where do you get this from? I could understand that they could get rid of the die area devoted to x86 decoding, but as I understand it x86 and x86-64 instructions get interpreted by the same execution units, which are bitness blind. What makes you th…
From what I understood. It's not "32-bit instructions" that are the problem. It's a load of crap associated with those 32-bit processors. There's more to x86 than just the instruction set. Operating systems need to carry the baggage in x86 if they want to allow users to run on old and new processors.
Re: Ask HN: Why hasn't x86 caught up with Apple M series?
#419Earlier quoted context omitted.
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. This isn't true. Yes, uncore power consumption is very important but so is CPU load efficiency. The faster the CPU can finish a task, the faster it can go back to sleep, aka race to sleep. Apple Silicon is 2-4x more efficient than AMD and Intel CPUs d…
> Apple Silicon is 2-4x more efficient than AMD and Intel CPUs during load while also having higher top end speed. This is not true. For high-throughput server software x86 is significantly more efficient than Apple Silicon. Apple Silicon optimizes for idle states and x86 optimizes for throughput, which assumes very different use cases. One of the challenges for using x86 in laptops is that the microarchitectures are…
For high-throughput server software x86 is significantly more efficient than Apple Silicon.
That said, Graviton is at least 50% of all AWS deployments now. So it's winning vs x86.
ARM in general does not have the top-end performance of x86 if you are doing any kind of performance engineering. I don't think that is controversial.
Re: Ask HN: Why hasn't x86 caught up with Apple M series?
#420Earlier quoted context omitted.
Apple took the ARM base design (they licensed it), and then they modified and tweaked it. You get the ARM ISA, and compilers that work for ARM will compile to Apple Silicon. It's just that the actual hardware you get, is better than the base design, and therefore beats other ARM processors in benchmarks.
It's more than that. They have an unlimited license to arm designs, and can change them as they see fit, since they were an early investors (or something along those lines). Other manufacturers can't get these terms, or if they can, it will be prohibtly expensive
Apple has an architectural license that lets them build their own ARM cores:
https://www.electronicsweekly.com/news/business/finance/arm-...
It is very unlikely Apple uses anything from ARM’s core designs, since that would require paying an additional license fee and Apple was able to design superior cores using its architectural license.