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Can Intel finally beat ARM on performance per Watt?

hackaday.com

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Re: Can Intel finally beat ARM on performance per Watt?

#41

Post by MBCook »

hamandcheese wrote: post #24
MBCook wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Plus it’s a phone chip. Yeah it’s used in the Neo but it’s no M5. It’s good Intel got to this point, but you can’t declare them tied with Apple. They qualified for the real race, which us great, but they're not going to win with that chip.

Doesn't it being a phone chip make the efficiency claim more impressive, not less? Moreover, from tfa: > This Dell also beats out both M4 and M3 Mac Studios, only failing to the M4 Mac Mini at 7.57 Gflops/W.

I haven’t followed the PC chip business anywhere near as much as I used to around the turn of the millennium. I was under the impression Intel actually made a few chips that could go quite low power. The problem was their performance sucked.

It’s good that this performs good and can go low power, but the big question to me is whether they can scale it up without it becoming a power sucking furnace.

There’s no other comment somewhere in here, where someone is pointing out that that was in FP64, which is not something most people use. Especially people who are going to buy a computer like this.

I suspect for me personally, integer use matters far, far, far more than anything else.

Re: Can Intel finally beat ARM on performance per Watt?

#42

Post by e12e »

anticorporate wrote: post #6

Rather than the Hackaday article, which doesn't add anything to the original, here's Jeff's actual video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A2B7oI0FYqo and post: https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2026/excited-for-intel-eff...

Thank you - especially for linking the article.

Re: Can Intel finally beat ARM on performance per Watt?

#43

Post by kristianp »

No headphone jack! Why Dell?

The processor is a Intel Core 5 320 Wildcat lake, with 4 "low power efficient cores" and 2 non-hyperthreaded Performance-cores.

It's variant of Panther Lake which has some models with Arc GPUs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panther_Lake_(microprocessor)

https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/sku/246018/...

Re: Can Intel finally beat ARM on performance per Watt?

#44

Post by 15155 »

3eb7988a1663 wrote: post #33

> no headphone jack I am fully old man screaming at the clouds here, but what does this cost for Dell to include? I insist on a wired headset - telecommunications already barely works, I don't want to add wireless+battery problems into the mix.

3.5mm TRS jacks might cost 10 cents to include and then hundreds of dollars to service when they break. The issue is not the BOM cost.

Re: Can Intel finally beat ARM on performance per Watt?

#45

Post by jeffbee »

It's long been possible (since Alder Lake at the latest) to tune Intel CPUs for task energy consumption competitive with Apple Silicon, but bone-headed OEMs including Apple always tuned them the other way, wasting a lot of power for tiny performance gains. It is inappropriate to say that you evaluated the perf per watt on a Core Ultra 7 265K because what you really evaluated was how HP, Lenovo, or Dell configured that chip. But for years it has been the case that with one of the Atom variants (Gracemont, Skymont, ___mont) tuned to non-ridiculous scaling modes (capped at 2GHz, say) the energy story is quite good. The Apple platform does not have eager scaling and this is part of their efficiency story.

Re: Can Intel finally beat ARM on performance per Watt?

#46

Post by Groxx »

15155 wrote: post #44
3eb7988a1663 wrote: post #33

> no headphone jack I am fully old man screaming at the clouds here, but what does this cost for Dell to include? I insist on a wired headset - telecommunications already barely works, I don't want to add wireless+battery problems into the mix.

3.5mm TRS jacks might cost 10 cents to include and then hundreds of dollars to service when they break. The issue is not the BOM cost.

We've got laptops with modular USB-C ports that solve this effectively perfectly. An audio one would be even simpler. The only reason you don't see it everywhere is because they're being outrageously hostile to repairs, and choosing to charge you hundreds of dollars for repairs on a part that they know is easily broken.

Re: Can Intel finally beat ARM on performance per Watt?

#47

Post by truncate »

3eb7988a1663 wrote: post #33

> no headphone jack I am fully old man screaming at the clouds here, but what does this cost for Dell to include? I insist on a wired headset - telecommunications already barely works, I don't want to add wireless+battery problems into the mix.

I like a good old headphone jack, but then the USB DACs these days are also super small and portable that I just keep connected to my wired sets. I have couple nice IEMs, and because my phone doesn't have jack, I've to carry around USB DAC anyway.

Re: Can Intel finally beat ARM on performance per Watt?

#48

Post by KingMachiavelli »

spockz wrote: post #32
KingMachiavelli wrote: post #25

A more accurate title is can Intel (Linux/Windows) beat Apple? If you don't want to run Windows, is there even a choice? My issue now with the non-Apple computers if you want to run Linux it's really hard to predict how awful Chromium/Firefox will be. My work Dell Laptop is only a 3 year old CPU with integrated GPU (and unused Nvidia GPU) but Chromium and Firefox are both slow as shit just loading pages like Slack an…

I’m running CachyOS (based on arch) and it is blazing fast. Both with Firefox and Vivaldi. Especially compared to the windows install I used to have on the same machine. Or is your point only about windows?

Hmm, I'm using the CachyOS kernel but on NixOS. What CPU/GPU are you using?

I tried using the flatpak Chromium in case it was some NixOS build optimization oddities but didn't see much of a difference.

Re: Can Intel finally beat ARM on performance per Watt?

#49

Post by noir_lord »

truncate wrote: post #47
3eb7988a1663 wrote: post #33

> no headphone jack I am fully old man screaming at the clouds here, but what does this cost for Dell to include? I insist on a wired headset - telecommunications already barely works, I don't want to add wireless+battery problems into the mix.

I like a good old headphone jack, but then the USB DACs these days are also super small and portable that I just keep connected to my wired sets. I have couple nice IEMs, and because my phone doesn't have jack, I've to carry around USB DAC anyway.

My (Razer Blackshark) gaming headset does that - the actual headset has a 3.5mm jack on it but the "guts" is a USB DAC with some THX stuff supposedly built in (questionable utility but most of the games I play don't support it anyway) - I figure they reuse the same headset components down the market and just don't ship the DAC, it works flawlessly under Windows/Linux so no real issues with it and I can use it with any other set of wired headphones (of similar impedance) which is nice since headsets wear out eventually but the DAC is solid state so should last much longer.

Re: Can Intel finally beat ARM on performance per Watt?

#50

Post by jackdoe »

15155 wrote: post #44
3eb7988a1663 wrote: post #33

> no headphone jack I am fully old man screaming at the clouds here, but what does this cost for Dell to include? I insist on a wired headset - telecommunications already barely works, I don't want to add wireless+battery problems into the mix.

3.5mm TRS jacks might cost 10 cents to include and then hundreds of dollars to service when they break. The issue is not the BOM cost.

> then hundreds of dollars to service when they break

Can you explain what do you mean by that? It is quite rare to see broken trrs jack on a laptop, at least I have never experienced one, nor on walkman or anything getting heavy plug/unplug use.

I thought it is an issue in reducing the cost to manufacture the case or something.

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