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Alder Lake Core i9 processor is faster than the M1 Max

macworld.com

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Re: Alder Lake Core i9 processor is faster than the M1 Max

#331

Post by apohn »

MBCook wrote: post #52
p1necone wrote: post #23

A lot of people are misinterpreting the results here (understandably, the article is pretty bad). They're benchmarking the CPU, but measuring the power draw of a whole laptop - including a dedicated 3080ti GPU which will still be drawing a decent amount of power even at idle. This benchmark is useful for measuring the speed and power draw of /this specific laptop/ vs an m1 MacBook, but not so much this new i9 in gene…

I’m guessing this is the first laptop Anandtech could get their hands on with this new chip. That said I’ve been out of the PC space for quite a while. Do mobile discrete GPUs greatly draw much power when mostly idle (such as general desktop work)? Did others give up on switching the discrete GPU on and off a needed as Apple used to do (and gave up on IIRC)?

>That said I’ve been out of the PC space for quite a while. Do mobile discrete GPUs greatly draw much power when mostly idle (such as general desktop work)? Did others give up on switching the discrete GPU on and off a needed as Apple used to do (and gave up on IIRC)?

I recently purchased and returned a Lenovo P1 Extreme Gen 4. It had an 11th generation i9 and a 3080.

With no external monitor attached, the 3080 power consumption in HWinfo was 0 watts doing basic tasks (e.g. surfing HN).This was plugged in or on battery.

If I plugged in an external 4K monitor, the 3080 power consumption was ~23 watts. A few watts less with a 1080 monitor. I think 27W if both were plugged in.

I think a lot of laptops can basically turn off the discrete GPU when it's not being used. Not sure about gaming laptops. There's some quirkiness to this with the GPU not turning always turning off when you unplug an external monitor - a reboot is required.

Re: Alder Lake Core i9 processor is faster than the M1 Max

#332

Post by marcan_42 »

mmmBacon wrote: post #330
marcan_42 wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not guessing. They are different dies. There is no need to write a hypothetical wall of text and get it wrong; you can just look up die shots or chip package shots or device trees and know they're different dies. This information is well known. There's a massive difference in size and aspect ratio between all 3 dies. It would not be cost efficient to fab M1 Max dies and sell them as M1 Pro. The M1 Max is explicit…

If the metal isn’t there it won’t show up in device tree because it physically isn’t connected on the die. So device tree as you keep pointing out cannot tell you if it’s same die or not. Also the device can be there and not be in device tree meaning the devices memory location was omitted from device tree when the device tree blob was built. It may well be that they have different die. But that’s usually an expensiv…

They do have downgrade paths for chips that don't yield: disabling some CPU or GPU cores, but not half the chip. That's why Apple sells those variants. Also, the M1 Max die physically doesn't fit on the substrate used for the M1 Pro.

Source: over one year working on reverse engineering this precise platform almost full time.

Also, if you've spent 23 years in the semiconductor industry, I have no idea where you're getting the "not connecting metal" story. Nobody does that. How would you even do that for a yield issue? That doesn't make any sense. Chips that have failed bits get the broken parts marked bad via eFuses after production and the initialization logic or bootloader will then read the fuses and power/clock gate those bits and lock them in that state, via existing isolation/gate logic. That's how the entire industry does it. Metal patches are for fixing design bugs in a respin and stuff like that, not for turning things off in a finished chip. And you certainly wouldn't make a change in the line to the metal to disable half a chip from the get go. That's just throwing silicon away for no reason, why wouldn't you try building the full thing first and seeing what works? The entire concept makes no sense.

Re: Alder Lake Core i9 processor is faster than the M1 Max

#333

Post by runeks »

ksec wrote: post #259
runeks wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The 100W M1 Max includes NPU, Media Engine, 8 Channel ( Or 16 depending how you want to count them ) memory controller, SSD Controller and GPU. It maxes out at 40W, not 100W (according to the Anandtech measurement).

I am sure the 40W is CPU only, excluding other part of the SoC. The M1 Max GPU alone could push to 60W.

No, they measure it at the wall minus idle usage: https://www.anandtech.com/show/17024/apple-m1-max-performanc...

But you’re right that this is not with the GPU loaded.

Re: Alder Lake Core i9 processor is faster than the M1 Max

#334

Post by MBCook »

na85 wrote: post #188
na85 wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

2 watts total? I doubt it. The display is a major drain. I went down this rabbit hole years ago and on a 2012-vintage X220 with an i7 I could get it down to just under 6W with the display on minimum brightness, the wifi and Bluetooth off, and a host of configuration options including but not limited to what's available through Powertop and TLP. I'm sure it's better than 5W and change nowadays but the display is by fa…

Ah yeah, maybe GPU only. Don't the MacBooks with the onboard discrete GPU have an integrated Intel GPU as well? I'd assume those ones physically power off the big daddy card when it's not needed.

They used to. That’s how they worked but it ended up more trouble than it’s worth. I think they stopped trying to switch it on/off during the Intel era (not sure) but there are no discrete GPUs in the M1 era so far.

Re: Alder Lake Core i9 processor is faster than the M1 Max

#335

Post by MBCook »

apohn wrote: post #331
MBCook wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m guessing this is the first laptop Anandtech could get their hands on with this new chip. That said I’ve been out of the PC space for quite a while. Do mobile discrete GPUs greatly draw much power when mostly idle (such as general desktop work)? Did others give up on switching the discrete GPU on and off a needed as Apple used to do (and gave up on IIRC)?

>That said I’ve been out of the PC space for quite a while. Do mobile discrete GPUs greatly draw much power when mostly idle (such as general desktop work)? Did others give up on switching the discrete GPU on and off a needed as Apple used to do (and gave up on IIRC)? I recently purchased and returned a Lenovo P1 Extreme Gen 4. It had an 11th generation i9 and a 3080. With no external monitor attached, the 3080 power…

Thanks for the numbers. I’m glad to hear it can turn off, but I will say I’m surprised it’s minimum draw is so high when it’s on.

Re: Alder Lake Core i9 processor is faster than the M1 Max

#336

Post by Miraste »

KennyBlanken wrote: post #169
Miraste wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple is rather good at planned obsolescence. Intel handed them a few years of unusable machines on a platter (thanks Intel) but I’m sure they’ll find new reasons for MacOS updates to degrade performance on old machines regardless of hardware capability.

They lead the industry in how long they provide OS update support for phones/tablets and desktops/laptops. They downclock the CPU on mobile devices as the battery ages, to keep the CPU from browning out so you My system, made in 2013, won't be supported by the next OS release this coming fall, but they usually continue security updates at least one release behind. That's basically ten years of hardware support. Keep…

Linux and Windows both support most hardware for longer than Apple does. It may not have a manufacturer stamp of approval, but Windows 10 supports CPUs back to some Pentium 4s with full security updates. That's a decade farther back than Apple.

Re: Alder Lake Core i9 processor is faster than the M1 Max

#337

Post by dont__panic »

BeefWellington wrote: post #142
DimmieMan wrote: post #47

This focus on raw performance makes sense when comparing desktop workstations but for laptops it misses the point and I hope it goes out of fashion. My MacBook Air runs Jetbrains + a couple containers just fine for almost a couple of work days on battery. Is this i9 faster? Yes but at a 6 hour battery life and 2.9Kg of weight it might as well be a desktop (just save money and buy/build a better desktop or get a conso…

> his focus on raw performance makes sense when comparing desktop workstations but for laptops it misses the point and I hope it goes out of fashion. > a cursory look suggests that laptop is also around $800 (AUD) more expensive than the (complete overkill for most) M1 it's comparing to, this is absolutely not a win. Regarding both points, the i9 laptop they tested has a 3080Ti in it, which would account for both the…

Since there is an integrated GPU in the CPU as well, wouldn't CPU-only tests generally keep the discrete GPU turned off? If this thing doesn't effectively use an iGPU to keep power usage down, that's just as valid a criticism -- why spend so much wattage on a component you're not even using significantly?

Re: Alder Lake Core i9 processor is faster than the M1 Max

#338

Post by R0b0t1 »

chias wrote: post #131
nielsbot wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

cryogenic cooling tho?

Wouldn't solve the problem. Basically you need the integrated components to have shorter transition times. These are an inherent property of the component: speeding up the transition time basically means "replace this component with a different component that has a shorter transition time"

Overvolting is how this is solved and works with adequate cooling.

Re: Alder Lake Core i9 processor is faster than the M1 Max

#339

Post by smoldesu »

inkyoto wrote: post #269
smoldesu wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> more importantly it has enormous levels of memory and storage bandwidth, which is what's actually important for most user workloads these days. I've heard this tossed around a lot, but is there any evidence that it's actually true? I struggle to imagine a regular workload that benefits from 32gbps of bandwidth, much less a scenario where the average layman could saturate a 200gbps or 400gbps bus.

> I struggle to imagine a regular workload that benefits from 32gbps of bandwidth, much less a scenario where the average layman could saturate a 200gbps or 400gbps bus. Since this is HN, many of us like… compiling, you know, stuff. It is a regular workload for many of us on here. The main beneficiary of the M1 Max wide memory architecture appears to be the Haskell GHC compiler, which is very, very voracious when it…

I'd be inclined to agree, but my 16gbps i5 520m compiles Rust just fine. Small and medium-sized desktop applications aren't constrained by bandwidth as much as they are CPU-bound.

I could easily imagine AI model training blowing up a memory bus, but every machine that isn't an M1 Pro or M1 Max is going to delegate that to a dGPU that is bound by PCIe bandwidth, not memory. Even then, properly-optimized CUDA programs will calculate most of the work on your GPU itself, constraining you to the 300-something gbps that your GPU is capable of.

Regardless, neither of these workloads are something that I'd imagine the average Macbook user doing on a regular basis. The only "real world" workload I can imagine that would exercise it is insanely high-res video encoding, which again, is only really going to be taken advantage of by a handful of users.

Re: Alder Lake Core i9 processor is faster than the M1 Max

#340

Post by smoldesu »

philistine wrote: post #228
smoldesu wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's touching that you reduce me to "Android commentator", but my point is that Apple has a lot of history to spite with their second-gen chips. Whether or not they're engineering their own cores or decided the name of ARM is irrelevant, they simply haven't proven that they can increase their desktop chip performance without packing more cores onto a die and calling it a day. If they manage to make significant single…

> If they manage to make significant single-core gains with their next-generation chips, I'd be impressed. Depending on what you mean by significant, they have made those every year since the iPhone 4 came out.

It appears that you doctored my quote somewhat, hm?
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