Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Intel Fires Back at Apple's M1 Processors with Benchmarks

tomshardware.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 61 posts

Re: Intel Fires Back at Apple's M1 Processors with Benchmarks

#51

Post by tedk-42 »

WoodenChair wrote: post #11
tedk-42 wrote: post #6

Sadly this is intel clutching at whatever it can to prove it's relevant. The real engineering feat of the M1 processor was how quickly it came to market and its performance per watt for real world usage of common web tasks and anything within the Apple ecosystem. As nice as battery life benchmarks are, I know that the Intel CPU will ramp up and chew through it's maximum rated wattage while keeping under it's thermal…

> The real engineering feat of the M1 processor was how quickly it came to market... Apple has been designing its own processors for 11 years and bought a team to do so that had been doing so for much longer than that. Also, nobody outside Apple knows how long they were working on M1 specifically.

Yeah in the mobile space - the whole x86 translation layer they implemented with custom hardware though would have blown the tops off the best engineers at Microsoft who work on their ARM Surface products.

I'm pretty interested to see what's in store for Apple during this transition

Re: Intel Fires Back at Apple's M1 Processors with Benchmarks

#52

Post by rasz »

Just a reminder: There was a time AMD was a butt of all jokes about their paper products and stupid bordering on insulting marketing. Then Intel came along and hired top AMD PR people away.

https://www.techspot.com/news/79579-intel-hires-marketing-ex...

https://www.eteknix.com/former-amd-marketing-director-chris-...

They also hired Raja Koduri to launch a mobile GPU in a desktop form factor ...

Re: Intel Fires Back at Apple's M1 Processors with Benchmarks

#53

Post by paulryanrogers »

snicker7 wrote: post #33

Wow. Intel's slides /reek/ of desperation. Intel can't beat Apple on performance per watt (other than price, that is the only metric that really matters), so they claim their competitive advantage is that there are more Steam games on Windows?

Preserving hardware backward compatibility is a valid selling point. And a costly one to maintain. Apple has leveraged software and tooling instead.

Re: Intel Fires Back at Apple's M1 Processors with Benchmarks

#54

Post by reasonabl_human »

asdfjklk234 wrote: post #43

Apple has the advantage of a 5nm Taiwan process node while Intel is making 10nm chips in Oregon and Arizona. And AMD Ryzen has the advantage of Taiwanese 7nm. Apple is hogging most 5nm capacity to itself because it can use its 800lb Gorilla volume to squeeze out competitors. ("All your 5nm belongs to us or we'll do you like we did nVidia. We've shipped over 1.65 billion devices and no one can afford to say no to us.…

Interesting point on the P/E considering eventual convergence on a final process node.... intel looks like a low-risk value play for the long run

Re: Intel Fires Back at Apple's M1 Processors with Benchmarks

#55

Post by DougN7 »

theluketaylor wrote: post #30
post_break wrote: post #2

They can benchmark all they want. My M1 macbook pro is silent, even during a facetime or zoom call. The battery lasts more than a day which is incredible, and has never burned my legs while watching a youtube video. Every laptop I've ever owned has been Intel and has never been able to do what this machine can do.

Agreed; my M1 macbook air is the best and fastest computer I have ever owned and it isn't even close. Instantly being on from sleep has made my work intel macbook pro feel old. Teams meetings turn the intel fan into a jet engine. My M1 macbook joins zoom meetings in utter silence for many, many hours without plugging in. I have yet to see a stutter or dropped frame in the M1 UI. My work intel mac pauses when swiping…

I wonder how much of this is because of the OS?

Re: Intel Fires Back at Apple's M1 Processors with Benchmarks

#56

Post by danaris »

kelchm wrote: post #32
WoodenChair wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The real engineering feat of the M1 processor was how quickly it came to market... Apple has been designing its own processors for 11 years and bought a team to do so that had been doing so for much longer than that. Also, nobody outside Apple knows how long they were working on M1 specifically.

It’s still pretty impressive that they pulled off a basically seamless architecture transition. M1 + Rosetta 2 just works so well it’s hard to even tell the difference much of the time.

I mean, they have done that twice before. They've clearly learned a few things.

Re: Intel Fires Back at Apple's M1 Processors with Benchmarks

#57

Post by rbanffy »

DougN7 wrote: post #55
theluketaylor wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed; my M1 macbook air is the best and fastest computer I have ever owned and it isn't even close. Instantly being on from sleep has made my work intel macbook pro feel old. Teams meetings turn the intel fan into a jet engine. My M1 macbook joins zoom meetings in utter silence for many, many hours without plugging in. I have yet to see a stutter or dropped frame in the M1 UI. My work intel mac pauses when swiping…

I wonder how much of this is because of the OS?

Apple has the opportunity to tune macOS to their hardware like nobody else and now they can also tune their hardware to macOS.

M1 is the result of that.

But the M1 also has another advantage over the Intel chips that preceded it in Macs - it's actually a beast of a CPU, with a huge reorder buffer and lots of execution ports to drain it.

Re: Intel Fires Back at Apple's M1 Processors with Benchmarks

#58

Post by vbezhenar »

calciphus wrote: post #49
post_break wrote: post #2

They can benchmark all they want. My M1 macbook pro is silent, even during a facetime or zoom call. The battery lasts more than a day which is incredible, and has never burned my legs while watching a youtube video. Every laptop I've ever owned has been Intel and has never been able to do what this machine can do.

This is the weirdest thing to me. I use a surface book and I've never had the fans turn on during video calls, even full-screen with lots of people on external 4k monitor. Everyone switching to the new M1 talks about how quiet they are and I've not had a computer make noise unless I'm playing a serious 3d games. Why were the last gen macs so noisy?

Intel Macbooks have terrible thermal management. People generally compare Intel Macbooks with M1 Macbooks.

Re: Intel Fires Back at Apple's M1 Processors with Benchmarks

#59

Post by dont__panic »

asdfjklk234 wrote: post #43

Apple has the advantage of a 5nm Taiwan process node while Intel is making 10nm chips in Oregon and Arizona. And AMD Ryzen has the advantage of Taiwanese 7nm. Apple is hogging most 5nm capacity to itself because it can use its 800lb Gorilla volume to squeeze out competitors. ("All your 5nm belongs to us or we'll do you like we did nVidia. We've shipped over 1.65 billion devices and no one can afford to say no to us.…

> Anyhow, it's impressive that Intel can even be in the same ballpark using much larger and much more power hungry 10nm gates made in the good ol' USA

Depending on how you choose to read this, this could also be a very strong signal that Apple still has plenty of room for optimization when node size bottoms out. Has Intel already used much of that optimization headroom? Will those optimizations necessarily transfer from 10nm to 7 and 5 and below?

Re: Intel Fires Back at Apple's M1 Processors with Benchmarks

#60

Post by cosmotic »

hctaw wrote: post #48
cosmotic wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Software support for the hardware encoding/deciding is very not good. Webcam streams mpeg to electron, electron probably decodes in software, reencodes in sofware, then decodes incoming stream(s) in software. If there's any client side encryption or filtering, that probably also happens in software. It's probably all JS software too. It's like the worst possible case for how to architect an app for performance. At le…

Zoom is QT, not electron. Also browser engines have good support for hardware decode, it's really in OSS libs and on platforms like Linux where there is little to no support.

They may have good hardware decode for web content, but whatever the circumstances, it's not kicking in for video conference. Maybe the use of low-latency codecs, multiple streams to decode, or other effects/compositing/analysis happening?
Post reply on HN