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Can Intel finally beat ARM on performance per Watt?

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

#161

Post by mmcnl »

aurareturn wrote: post #108
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…

You're completely right. Power draw scales non-linearly with clock frequency. Therefore one can easily increase perf/W by lowering the clock frequency, at the expense of performance. This is not new information, this is basic physics. The Apple M-chips were not revolutionary because of their efficiency, but because they were (and still are) efficient AND fast. In fact the fastest consumer chips on the market.

So agreed, this is extremely misleading.

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

#162

Post by mmcnl »

geerlingguy wrote: post #115
therealmarv wrote: post #105

In Germany the Dell XPS 13 2026 is 56% more expensive (over 1000 Euros) than the MacBook Neo (below 700). So the claim does not hold World wide, maybe only in US on local prices.

Yeah, not sure why Dell has such a spread on US vs rest-of-world pricing here. I know some have mentioned the $699/$599 price could also change a bit in the US come November. The internal assembly and parts seem like they'd cost Dell a little more than Apple's cost building the Neo, so maybe in the US they're selling them closer to at cost, and subsidizing it with the Windows exclusivity and price elsewhere? Not sure…

Easy, it's priced much lower in the US on purpose so that reviewers will directly compare it with the Neo to get more favorable reviews, while in fact it should be compared to the Air from a price perspective (and then it will lose on everything big time except the 120Hz display). It's all misleading marketing.

MacBooks simply have the best value proposition. Compared to the competition at similar price point they are much faster, have much better build quality, better displays, better battery life, less fan noise, etc. Also much higher resale value.

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

#163

Post by mmcnl »

miladyincontrol wrote: post #21

Intel wins, in HPL FP64. Its a stretch to take a single metric and apply it's outcome broadly to the chip's general functionality. Especially when by large the A18 chip with half the power requirement beats it in almost every other benchmark.

Yeah this is misleading cherrypicking. Also it's super slow. Not impressed with slow efficient chips. Anyone can make a chip efficient by reducing clock frequency and sacrificing performance in the process.

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

#164

Post by podocarp »

aryonoco wrote: post #76

Intel’s low end SoCs are such an undervalued gem. A couple of years ago I got tired of dealing with OpenWRT and various Tomato based firmware or hunting down compatibility between ARM and MIPS based routers. I finally took the plunge and bought myself a mini pc with an Intel N100. The thing has 4 cores (no SMT), a 6W TDP and boosts to 3.4 GHz and can support 16GB of ram. The mini pc I bought cost me $200, includes th…

Personally have the same experience too. I am tired trying to find out if the xyzPi of the day boards can do Linux. Vendors should also try harder. There are so many boards that release with half baked implementations or proprietary blobs. x86 always just works. Devices are also almost always just pcie devices even for those mini PCs with lots of interfaces. Compare to something like bananapi R4 that I think have some oddities with a mux chip not available in vanilla linux…

It's also super easy to spec out your own devices in this regime on x86. There are mini itx boards with n100/n305 with pcie slots so you can add your own cards, and the n100 has a surprisingly number of available lanes for its small size.

There just seems to be no viable "just works" solution in the below 10 or 20W range apart from raspberry pi, and Intel n100/n305.

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

#165

Post by xnx »

ben-schaaf wrote: post #96
xnx wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like a good option. Still having fans keeps it way behind the Neo in my mind.

Given how appalling the thermal throttling behaviour is on the Neo - sustained workloads can lose up to 50% performance, making it substantially slower than an M1 Air - you should instead be asking for a fan in the Neo.

Fans are a good addition if they only activate during peak load, but my experience with Dell is that the hardware and firmware design is so poor that the fans always operate at near full speed.

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

#166

Post by xyzzy3000 »

wjnc wrote: post #153
geerlingguy wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I never said it wasn't clickbait. If you don't like it, either install DeArrow or subscribe to my blog, where I tone it down for the more technical audience. (Or block/ignore my content, no skin off my back!)

I think the lite tip of: “take your credibility seriously” stands, however you are getting attacked by pretty much one (ab-)user. (Those type of users are normally not even in your market.) I think it’s pretty normal that you are incentivized by YT. Too bad the internet favors screaming and yelling. Pretty clear line you draw between writing and video.

No, I disagree with you here - it isn't one user and certainly not an abuser. This is reputationally damaging, and doubling down is not helping. Arguably, the doubling down is the most damaging part.

An absence of open expression of disapproval is not the same as approval - people may just be avoiding dogpiling a member of our community.

I would add that people have a right to express disagreement or disappointment in a respectful manner in accordance with the rules of this moderated private space, and we have not had moderation/interventions suggesting otherwise. The criticisms are reasonable, to my mind at least, and probably ought to be taken as a massive hint that something is wrong. We are less than a day in, and it's not too late to fix things.

I am trying not to be too critical, as I have enjoyed previous content from this channel and I wish the poster well for the future.

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

#167

Post by ponector »

firecall wrote: post #93
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.

For a school laptop it’s a unfortunate omission IMHO. Cheap wired headphones are the default choice in the classroom, in my experience. Bluetooth headphones that need charging aren’t really what you want. It’s easy enough to get cheap USB headphone adapter, but still, I t would nice if it was built in. Apple knows what they are doing sometimes it seems! :-)

Given there are enough USB-C ports - it is not an issue. For old headphones buy an adapter and next time buy cheap USB-c headphones.

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

#168

Post by podocarp »

WithinReason wrote: post #150
aurareturn wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I wasn't talking about any of those

Please clarify?

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

#169

Post by wjnc »

xyzzy3000 wrote: post #166
wjnc wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the lite tip of: “take your credibility seriously” stands, however you are getting attacked by pretty much one (ab-)user. (Those type of users are normally not even in your market.) I think it’s pretty normal that you are incentivized by YT. Too bad the internet favors screaming and yelling. Pretty clear line you draw between writing and video.

No, I disagree with you here - it isn't one user and certainly not an abuser. This is reputationally damaging, and doubling down is not helping. Arguably, the doubling down is the most damaging part. An absence of open expression of disapproval is not the same as approval - people may just be avoiding dogpiling a member of our community. I would add that people have a right to express disagreement or disappointment i…

I’ll just go and pick out those sentences I find not of curious good will for this forum:

“Did Jeff […] get paid to post misleading headlines”

“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.”

Ad hominem, cursing, opinion as fact with a barrage of replies.

That could have gone three steps up in politeness without losing any of the criticism.

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

#170

Post by joshspankit »

HeWhoLurksLate wrote: post #147
aurareturn wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just because this title did the best doesn't make it not misleading. If you are a serious reviewer, it wouldn't have been an option in the first place. You can make an even more outlandish title and get even more views. Doesn't make it right.

since it's too much to paste in here, here's 10 recent tech review videos from each of the top 10 most viewed tech youtubers: https://pastebin.com/4PZe9iTf Here's a few of them: - Humane AI Pin Review: The Worst Product I've Ever Reviewed - I Tested the World's Craziest Smartphone - Do NOT Buy These Fake Tech Products! - This Is Not a Normal Laptop... - Unboxing the $10,000 Mystery Tech Box - Don't Make This PC Build…

It also seems that YouTube is steering the ship: they could simply push content that’s straightforward and non-clickbait (and in fact: downgrade clickbait), but as Geoff says the clickbait got 2x the traffic.

That’s not “the same amount of people were shown the video and 2x the people clicked in”. The algo is always skewing.

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