It does when you multiply it across millions of CPUs. Saving 100 watts across 3 million CPUs (300 megawatts) is enough to shut down the equivalent of power plants.
I'm all for efficiency but if we are to progress as a civilization we need to find a way to not have power hold us back. We can get to a point where we have nearly unlimited power with minimal impact on the environment around us. That needs to happen as soon as possible.
> and also eliminates a lot of the need to copy data from RAM to VRAM, as both the GPU and the CPU can access the same memory. In return, this allows the GPU to match the performance of discrete GPUs that have a lot more cores. Plenty of PC hardware reviewers have done sensitivity analysis experiments to see how discrete GPU performance is affected by running with a slower or narrower PCIe link. The consensus is usua…
You can generally ignore FPS numbers as irrelevant outside of extremes, what people notice is stutter and that’s where PCIe link bandwidth matters.
I think it's more accurate to say that PCIe link bandwidth matters when your VRAM capacity starts to become insufficient, a problem that Apple sidesteps. The key advantage of Apple's unified memory strategy isn't fast communication between CPU and GPU, but in granting the GPU access to a high-capacity memory pool (with some side benefits of giving the CPU access to GPU-like memory bandwidth).
Citation needed? Do you live in some alternate reality? > "... the difference of a few 10s of watts doesn't really make any difference, unless you have numbers to back up your very strong claim." We have a billion power-hungry PCs running on the planet. Power-efficiency matters for economy and for environment, because power isn't free and only a tiny speck of the world runs on clean energy. It always mattered.
Most of those systems sit at idle, when they are on at all. Idle power is not the same as TDP. The idle difference is not so great that it's a big deal.
One of my biggest gripes about Macs is that their thermal engineers refuse to get off their high horses and build real cooling solutions that don't artifically limit the capabilities of an objectively performance-competitive CPU.
I don't care if it consumes 200 W of power. I don't care if the chassis needs to be thicker to accommodate a larger heatsink. I don't care if you need to run the fans at 100%. Just let me use the full power of the CPU created by the chip designers god dammit!
Where are the performance per watt numbers? Anyone can get the performance crown by having an unlimited energy budget. Performance per watt is much more valuable in data centers (TCO) and consumer devices (battery life).
Not always, if you are connected to a source of electricity and doing something limited by speed performance is critical. For me, Desktop use is almost perfect on Apple due to battery life and perf but professional use is much better on Intel/AMD+NVidia. Also you could get much more perf for $ on such machines
> professional use
I hate this terminology. How would anyone define "professional use"
Do general consumers care about wattage being used on a desktop? I don't think many consider it at all, they just want the performance. It matters on a mobile device like a laptop, tablet or phone, but that's about where consumers stop caring.
Depends on the use case. I personally undervolt my AMD 7950X in my gaming PC to use less power and thus generate less heat and fan noise. It makes a big difference.
Getting quieter fans on a better cooler might make a bigger difference.
50% slower than the absolute best of class NVIDIA discrete GPU offering that consumes massively more wattage is hardly a damning statement.
Most consumers don't care about wattage on a desktop, and when you compare the prices they are similar and it loses.
Many people do care - many Americans have subsidized low power but that’s not globally true and even if your power is free a hot CPU means you’re listening to fan noise and heating up the room. In a cold winter that’s not bad but I knew people who had to do things like leave their office doors open for cooling.
The results speak for themselves (Apple is slower than some) but the context does matter: Apple has been talking about performance per watt since Steve Jobs showed a keynote slide announcing the transition from PowerPC. The cynical view is that Apple is intentionally misleading customers with their ambiguous graph axes. Another perspective is they’re simply demonstrating the metric they’ve optimized for in the first…
Do people really care about efficiency for plugged-in devices? There is the environmental factor, but there are people on 100% renewable a too...
Even if your power is free, heat means a toasty office and fan noise, not to mention being careful about air flow around your furniture. Not a deal breaker but 100% of the Apple Silicon users I know have mentioned not previously having appreciated just how much noise their old systems made.