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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?

#191

Post by bigyabai »

mmcnl wrote: post #162
geerlingguy wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ar…

Value proposition is still subjective. Apple should be making money hand-over-fist from the AI boom, but Nvidia is the one that wooed over the datacenter with their high-performance ARM chipsets. Apple's unwillingness to support CUDA cost them a market that was worth almost $2-3 trillion, and forces local CoreML to compete with CUDNN in ways that it can never triumph.

Macs are great if you want a Mac. If you want a flexible workstation, a gaming PC, a retrocomputing build, an inference server, a programming environment, or a headless VPS, macOS doesn't even attempt to cover your use-case. It's the reason why the Mac install base is still vying for pole position after 40 years of "you're holding it wrong" to their users.

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

#192

Post by throwaway27727 »

j16sdiz wrote: post #60
3eb7988a1663 wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does anyone even do repairs anymore? Swap a motherboard and that's it.

So... swapping $100 component for a $0.3 break? Doesn't this make including the jack even less justifiable?

If anything it becomes way more lucrative for the manufacturer.

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

#193

Post by AnthonyMouse »

aurareturn wrote: post #155
podocarp wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which reviewer does that? How do you isolate CPU power? Measuring the pins? Software reporting is half bullshit. Also nobody even reports idle power. Don't tell me idle is hard to define bla bla we all know what's idle. Even an inaccurate figure is better than no figure. And there are community compiled lists that are very helpful when building systems. So where is the reviewer worth their salt you're talking about?

Notebookcheck always isolates CPU power by measuring idle and draw from the wall. Many top quality CPU reviewers also do this. Chinese reviewer Geekerwan is probably the best at it. In the past, written reviews like Anandtech will always do it. Today, anyone with video editing software thinks they can review CPU performance. Ever since Youtube, there have been plenty of low quality reviewers that mislead people. I di…

> Notebookcheck always isolates CPU power by measuring idle and draw from the wall.

That's not actually isolating CPU power. To begin with, the CPU itself has idle power draw. Measuring that way would favor a CPU that has worse power management because it would be excluding the draw the CPU itself fails to shed at idle.

It also gets it wrong the other way. The SSD etc. is using however much at idle but that isn't the amount it uses when running the benchmark. Many of them don't have very fine grained power management and will draw ~100mW at idle but consume close to full power under even moderate load.

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

#194

Post by timpera »

tremon wrote: post #180
geerlingguy wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, this laptop was loaned to me for a couple weeks (it's boxed up and ready to ship back now), and I fully disclose any and all sponsorship (this was not sponsored in any way); see my policies here: https://github.com/geerlingguy/youtube#sponsorships Further, I'm basing my opinion on a number of benchmarks and power measurements besides just HPL. I just favor that because it's one of the few that push a CPU hard, fi…

> this laptop was loaned to me for a couple weeks > this was not sponsored in any way Aren't you contradicting yourself here? For what purpose was the laptop loaned to you, and by whom? I'd consider a review loan a kind of sponsorship, even if you weren't paid to come to a specific conclusion.

It's common for manufacturers to loan devices for review, without having any input in the content of the review. It is disclosed here in the video, which seems fine imo.

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

#195

Post by kadoban »

tremon wrote: post #180
geerlingguy wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, this laptop was loaned to me for a couple weeks (it's boxed up and ready to ship back now), and I fully disclose any and all sponsorship (this was not sponsored in any way); see my policies here: https://github.com/geerlingguy/youtube#sponsorships Further, I'm basing my opinion on a number of benchmarks and power measurements besides just HPL. I just favor that because it's one of the few that push a CPU hard, fi…

> this laptop was loaned to me for a couple weeks > this was not sponsored in any way Aren't you contradicting yourself here? For what purpose was the laptop loaned to you, and by whom? I'd consider a review loan a kind of sponsorship, even if you weren't paid to come to a specific conclusion.

It was obviously loaned so he could do a review. That's not sponsorship.

You should _want_ that to happen, otherwise the only people who can do reviews will be the few who can afford to spend thousands for hardware they don't want or need.

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

#196

Post by throwawayZvY7QV »

geerlingguy wrote: post #119
aurareturn wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is your actual headline: "Intel just matched Apple Silicon. Seriously." You're basing the headline on a single FP64 test for a $600 laptop. Come on man. If your headline was being honest, it'd say "Apple A18 Pro is still 3-4x more efficient and significantly faster than Intel's low end chip in common tasks". If this isn't an undisclosed sponsored review, then it's just misleading clickbait for Youtube views. It'…

I had three YouTube titles, this one got about 2x the watch time as the other two, so I let YT pick it. For technical readers, I write my blog posts. I don't have to (I lose money hosting that thing and all it's mostly just free training data for Anthropic, OpenAI, et all), but I enjoy writing, so I do it anyway. If you don't like the YT game, please subscribe to the blog's RSS feed. I much prefer text over video.

[dead]

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

#197

Post by hajile »

pclmulqdq wrote: post #129
pertymcpert wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which workloads?

Literally every workload not named above. It’s the default for a non-integer number. * Web rendering and almost all web apps (see the JS number type) * Most things in a game not done on the GPU * Audio processing * Most GUI processing/rendering * Every miscellaneous/scalar calculation these days Believe it or not, on a CPU this adds up to a lot more than the work you get doing AI processing.

JS converts most number into 31-bit ints internally (which is why it’s so fast). GUI work often prefers int or f32.

You have a point about games, but the CPU is seldom the limiting factor.

Very few people are handling raw audio. For the rest, codec hardware beats everything else by a massive margin.

Being good at floats matters, but even float-heavy code generally has way more integers than floats making integer performance king.

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

#198

Post by [deleted] »

aoeusnth1 wrote: post #190
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!)

It sounds like you agree with the criticism that your title is a bunch of baloney, but somehow think that's not your fault? You wrote the lies in that title, not an algorithm.

[deleted]

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

#199

Post by intrasight »

mortsnort wrote: post #182
intrasight wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"competing" is not the same thing as "competitive". Apple is 1-2 years ahead. If they remain so indefinitely into the future then Intel is not competitive.

Except Intel can run Linux. A powerful enough laptop with M efficiency that can run Linux is compelling for many laptop buyers, especially the HN crowd.

True. I was referring only to the silicon. Apple's OS totally sucks.

I can envision a day when Apple properly supports Linux. I cannot envision a day when their OS doesn't suck.

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

#200

Post by pclmulqdq »

hajile wrote: post #197
pclmulqdq wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Literally every workload not named above. It’s the default for a non-integer number. * Web rendering and almost all web apps (see the JS number type) * Most things in a game not done on the GPU * Audio processing * Most GUI processing/rendering * Every miscellaneous/scalar calculation these days Believe it or not, on a CPU this adds up to a lot more than the work you get doing AI processing.

JS converts most number into 31-bit ints internally (which is why it’s so fast). GUI work often prefers int or f32. You have a point about games, but the CPU is seldom the limiting factor. Very few people are handling raw audio. For the rest, codec hardware beats everything else by a massive margin. Being good at floats matters, but even float-heavy code generally has way more integers than floats making integer perf…

Quite a lot of web rendering is done with non-integer JS Number types, aka FP64. You are right that there’s a 31-bit integer optimization, but once you have a non-integer in the mix, it’s FP64. Many GUIs some time ago would use FP32, but in 2026 there’s a lot more FP64 out there than you give credit for.
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