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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?

#581

Post by williamDafoe »

gowld wrote: post #446
diggan wrote: post #410

Earlier 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…

Apple has been vertically integrate for 50 years. Microsoft has been horizontally integrated for 50 years. That's why Apple is good at making a whole single system that works by itself, and Microsoft is good at making a system that works with almost everything almost everyone has made almost ever.

The 2019 Macs were vertically integrated and Apple could do NOTHING good with the Intel PowerPig i9 CPUs. My i9 once once ran down from 100% charge to 0% in 90 mins PLUGGED IN ON 95W CHARGER! I was hosting a meeting. The M1-M4 CPUs forsake multithreading and downclock and this is one of the many ways they save power. Video codecs are particularly power efficient on mobile chips!

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

#582

Post by williamDafoe »

ben-schaaf wrote: post #563
RajT88 wrote: post #366

Earlier 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…

This is easy to disprove. The Snapdragon X Elite has significantly better battery life than what AMD or Intel offer, and yet it's got the same number of cooks in the kitchen. > 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 Same thing happens in Apple land: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44745897 . My Framework 16 hasn't had this iss…

X Elite is not better than Ryzen5. Not better at all! Its why i own a hx365 AMD laptop...

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

#583

Post by williamDafoe »

yaro330 wrote: post #205
aurareturn wrote: post #167

Earlier 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 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…

I did mips per watt calculations in 2017 and Apple (A10 i think) was 2-3x better than intel. See "how to build a computer" by donald gillies (slideshare slides). I was shocked, i didnt expect this at all!

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

#584

Post by aurareturn »

ksec wrote: post #544
aurareturn wrote: post #419

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For high-throughput server software x86 is significantly more efficient than Apple Silicon. In the server space, x86 has the highest performance right now. Yes. That's true. That's also because Apple does not make server parts. Look for Qualcomm to try to win the server performance crown in the next few years with their Oryon cores. That said, Graviton is at least 50% of all AWS deployments now. So it's winning vs x8…

I dont think the point Amazon uses ARM was about performance but purely cost optimisation. At one point, nearly 40% of Intel's server revenue was coming from Amazon. They just figure it out at their scale it would be cheaper to do it themselves. But I am purely guessing ARM has risen their price per core so it makes less financial sense to do a yearly update on CPU. They are also going into Server CPU business meanin…

Server CPUs do not win on performance alone. They win on performance/$, LTV/$, etc. That's why Graviton is winning on AWS.

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

#585

Post by danielbarla »

williamDafoe wrote: post #581
gowld wrote: post #446

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple has been vertically integrate for 50 years. Microsoft has been horizontally integrated for 50 years. That's why Apple is good at making a whole single system that works by itself, and Microsoft is good at making a system that works with almost everything almost everyone has made almost ever.

The 2019 Macs were vertically integrated and Apple could do NOTHING good with the Intel PowerPig i9 CPUs. My i9 once once ran down from 100% charge to 0% in 90 mins PLUGGED IN ON 95W CHARGER! I was hosting a meeting. The M1-M4 CPUs forsake multithreading and downclock and this is one of the many ways they save power. Video codecs are particularly power efficient on mobile chips!

I used a 2019 MacBook Pro for quite a while, and it was my first (and so far only) dip into Apple-land. While I appreciated the really solid build quality, great screen, etc, the battery life was pretty abysmal. We're talking easily under 2 hours if I had to be in a video call, which basically meant taking a charger to any meeting of decent length.

The 2nd biggest disappointment was when I ran my team's compute-heavy workload locally, expecting blistering performance from the i9, only to find that the CPU got throttled to under 50% (I seem to recall 47%, but my memory is fuzzy), within 6 seconds of starting the workload. And this was essentially a brand new laptop, so it likely wasn't blocked fan intakes. I fail to see the point of putting a CPU in a laptop that your thermal design simply can't handle.

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

#586

Post by ben-schaaf »

williamDafoe wrote: post #582
ben-schaaf wrote: post #563

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is easy to disprove. The Snapdragon X Elite has significantly better battery life than what AMD or Intel offer, and yet it's got the same number of cooks in the kitchen. > 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 Same thing happens in Apple land: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44745897 . My Framework 16 hasn't had this iss…

X Elite is not better than Ryzen5. Not better at all! Its why i own a hx365 AMD laptop...

Do you have a source on that? From every benchmark I've looked at the X Elite gets similar battery life to Apple Silicon, pretty far ahead of AMD.

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

#588

Post by qcnguy »

curt15 wrote: post #448
qcnguy wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And the more relevant case for laptops is macOS, which is heavily optimized for battery life and power draw in ways that Linux just isn't, neither is Windows. A lot of the problems here can't actually be fixed by intel, amd, or anyone designing x86 laptops because getting that level of efficiency requires the ability to strongly lead the app developer community. It also requires highly competent operating system deve…

>And the more relevant case for laptops is macOS, which is heavily optimized for battery life and power draw in ways that Linux just isn't, neither is Windows. What are some examples of power draw savings that Linux is leaving on the table?

There's no equivalent of AppNap if I recall correctly and drivers often aren't aggressive at shutting down unused devices, or they don't do it at all. Linux has historically had a lot of problems with reliable suspends too.

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

#589

Post by fluoridation »

rerdavies wrote: post #564
fluoridation wrote: post #465

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>This would strip out tons of MOV instructions which was proven with AMD64 to have a decent impact on performance. Sure, but the topic is optimizing power efficiency by removing support for an instruction set. That aside, if an instruction isn't very performant, it isn't much of an issue per se. It just means it won't get used much and so chip design resources will be suboptimally allocated. That's a problem for Inte…

ARM has THREE instruction sets. (four?) aarch32, aarch64, and various incarnations of Thumb. (A PI 5 supports all three).

Okay? x86-64 has like twenty extensions. What's your point?

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

#590

Post by pdimitar »

int_19h wrote: post #463
diggan wrote: post #414

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Mac Studio is pretty good on everything except raw GPU speed. Which depending on your use cases may be completely irrelevant.

I don't disagree but Mac Studio is also way too expensive. I can build a professional Linux workstation for 70% of the price of a non-minimal Studio, and I'll get a lot of goodies in the package (and future-proofed configuration too).
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