Intel and AMD have to earn their investments back in one generation, Apple can earn their investments back over a customers lifetime.
Ask HN: Why hasn't x86 caught up with Apple M series?
431–440 of 640 posts
Re: Ask HN: Why hasn't x86 caught up with Apple M series?
#432Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Apple is vertically integrated and can optimize > Compare that to how many cooks are in the kitchen in Wintel land. Perfect example is trying to get to the bottom of why your windows laptop won't go to sleep and cooks itself in your backpack So, I was thinking like this as well, and after I lost my Carbon X1 I felt adventurous, but not too adventurous, and wanted a laptop that "could just work". The thinking was "I…
Surprised to hear this. Back in the Surface Pro 4 days, the hardware was great. I made it through college doing 95% of my work on a Surface Pro 4 tablet with the magnetic keyboard and almost always made it through the entire day without having to plug it in.
My wife swears by her surface pros, and she has owned a few.
I've had a few Surface Book 2's for work, and they were fine except: needed more RAM, and there was some issue with connection between screen and base which make USB headsets hinky.
Re: Ask HN: Why hasn't x86 caught up with Apple M series?
#433Earlier 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. Apple is vertically integrated and can optimize at the OS and for many applications they ship with the device. Compare that to how many cooks are in the kitchen in Wintel land. Perfect example is trying to get to the bottom of why your windows lapto…
Also on the HN front page today: > Framework 16 > The 2nd Gen Keyboard retains the same hardware as the 1st Gen but introduces refreshed artwork and updated firmware, which includes a fix to prevent the system from waking while carried in a bag.
There are some reports of this with Macbooks as well. But my (non-scientific) impression is that a lot more people in Wintel land are seeing it. All of my work laptops, and a few of my personal laptops have done this to me since I started using Windows 10/11.
Re: Ask HN: Why hasn't x86 caught up with Apple M series?
#434Earlier 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…
Apple purchased Palo Alto Semi which made the biggest difference. One of their best acquisitions ever in my opinion… not that they make all that many of those anyway.
Apple actually makes a lot more acquisitions than you think, but they are rarely very high profile/talked about: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisitio...
Re: Ask HN: Why hasn't x86 caught up with Apple M series?
#435AMD needs to put out a reference motherboard to pair with their chips. They’re basically relying on third-party “manufacturers” to put up R&D. We have decades of these mobo manufacturers doing bare min churning out crappy quality mobos. No one’s interested in overclocking in 2025. Why am I paying $300 premium for a feature I don’t care about?
Re: Ask HN: Why hasn't x86 caught up with Apple M series?
#436Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Ha. Same here. My personal MBA M1/8GB just chugs along with whatever I need it to do. I have a T480 32GB linux machine at home that I love, but my M1 just does what I need it to do. And at the shop we are doing technology refreshes for the whole dev team upgrading them to M4s. I was asked if I wanted to upgrade my M1 Pro to an M4, and I said no. Mainly because I don't want to have to move my tooling over to a new mac…
Man, it's absolutely trivial to migrate your configurations to a new machine.
Re: Ask HN: Why hasn't x86 caught up with Apple M series?
#437> 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…
I just recently was trying to buy a laptop and was looking at that chip, but like you said, not available in anything except framework desktops and a weird tablet thats 2.5x expensive as a macbook. Its competitive on paper, but is still completely infeasible at the moment.
Re: Ask HN: Why hasn't x86 caught up with Apple M series?
#438Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 qu…
> Like, would I prefer an older-style Macbook overall, with an integrated card reader, HDMI port, ethernet jack, all that? Yeah, sure. Modern MacBook pros have 2/3 (card reader and HDMI port), and they brought back my beloved MagSafe charging.
No shit! I'm still rocking the M1 Pro for personal and the M2 Air for work so I do have magsafe back for one of them at least, but just USB-C besides that.
But yeah IMHO there's just no comparison. Unless you're one of those folks who simply cannot fucking stand Mac, it's just no contest.
Re: Ask HN: Why hasn't x86 caught up with Apple M series?
#439I think this is partially down to Framework being a very small and new company that doesn't have the resources to make the best use of every last coulomb, rather than an inherent deficiency of x86. The larger companies like Asus and Lenovo are able to build more efficient laptops (at least under Windows), while Apple (having very few product SKUs and full vertical integration) can push things even further. notebookch…
Framework is a bit behind the others in terms of cooling, apparently due to compromises needed to achieve modularity. However, a well-tuned Ryzen U in the latest ThinkPads is not that far from M chips in terms of computing power per Watt according to some benchmarks. Most Linux distributions are not well tuned, because this is too device-specific. Spending a few minutes writing custom udev rules, with the aid of powe…
> using a barebones setup with few running surfaces
The entire point here is that you can run whatever the hell you want on Apples stuff without breaking a sweat. I shouldn’t have to counter shit.
Re: Ask HN: Why hasn't x86 caught up with Apple M series?
#440Earlier quoted context omitted.
+1 on powertop, i have use it successfully for tunning old macs that I have upcycled with Linux and difference is day & night.
powertop helps a lot, I went from 3-4 hours to 6-7 hours on a ThinkPad. That said, it's not something you would want to bother a regular user with. E.g. enabling powertop optimizations will enable USB autosuspend, this will add a delay every darn time you didn't touch your USB keyboard or mouse for a second. So, you end up writing udev rules that excludes certain HID devices (or using different settings for when a la…
I agree. The trick is to use powertop's suggestions to craft good udev rules, not to enable the powertop optimizations daemon directly. That doesn't work well in many scenarios. Someone should create a udev rule hardware database, or a udev rule generator for laptops and desktops to help common users.