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

Can Intel finally beat ARM on performance per Watt?

hackaday.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 205 posts

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

#101

Post by 15155 »

Groxx wrote: post #46
15155 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Why is anything modular a good solution over a USB-C DAC-containing dongle cable?

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

#102

Post by 15155 »

jackdoe wrote: post #50
15155 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

All physical receptacles break and increase failures by measurable amounts at mass-production scale.

You take care of your hardware, even during "heavy use," many people absolutely do not - and are downright abusive.

Many of these parts exhibit partial or intermittent failure modes where it's more expensive and difficult to determine warranty eligibility than to just fix the problem. Peanut butter in the jack, loose solder joints, whatever.

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

#103

Post by djfergus »

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.

>> what does this cost for dell to include?

1) a few cents of components

2) the opportunity cost of selling you a high margin dongle

3) minus the risk of a lost sale if you buy a competitor

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

#106

Post by aurareturn »

WithinReason wrote: post #23

If you normalise for both process node and clock speed, AMD and Apple are tied on single threaded perf/watt, and AMD Zen 5c cores have about a 12% perf/area advantage.

Absolutely not true.

Apple leads in IPC, perf/area in CPU, and raw performance. We already have TSMC N7, N5, N4 AMD vs Apple CPUs to compare.

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

#107

Post by aurareturn »

amelius wrote: post #37

Whoever used the most recent TSMC node will have the best specs. My guess is that even the designs of the transistors and perhaps logic gates are IP blocks owned by TSMC and not whoever wants to get their chip fabricated.

This isn't true because Apple's N5 CPUs are faster and more efficient than Intel's TSMC N3 CPUs (Lunar Lake).

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

#108

Post by aurareturn »

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...

Did Jeff Geerling get paid to post misleading headlines and reviews on Intel vs Apple?

He's basing this on his own "super computing benchmark" measuring only FP64 performance. Meanwhile, any normal person using these $600 laptops will never run FP64 supercomputing tasks on the CPU.

He also only showed perf/watt in this one benchmark but skipped the fact that Apple Silicon is significantly faster.

  Obviously, all this efficiency is on the low end—the laptop only achieves a little over 120 Gflops, while Apple's faster M3 and M4 Macs are pushing through up to 1.2 Teraflops.
I can't believe this crap is getting upvoted. Hopefully this guy loses all his credibility going forward. This kind of post is seriously misleading and smells like like an undisclosed sponsor review.

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

#109

Post by MBCook »

Archit3ch wrote: post #74
MBCook wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 c…

> in FP64, which is not something most people use It's used in audio processing. But large DAW sessions need something beefier than both tested devices (Macbook Neo, XPS).

It might be used a little bit in other places, wouldn’t surprise me one bit. And it’s good that the computers are capable of it. Even if someone can’t get a more powerful computer, it’s nice that they have the ability to use it for almost anything (within some limits) if they’re patient.

But as you said, if your workflow really needs FP64 you’re probably not reaching for a MacBook Neo or this Intel thing.

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

#110

Post by scott01 »

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 have to say, I prefer dongles lately. There are many inexpensive hifi dongles that sound great with in-ears. They’re also USB class-compliant audio devices and work everywhere. Obviously a preference, but as other commenters have mentioned, 3.5 jacks do break, and I’ve personally broken plenty.
Post reply on HN