391–400 of 446 posts
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Apple’s ARM cores have wider decode than x86 M1 - 8 wide M4 - 10 wide Zen 4 - 4 wide Zen 5 - 8 wide
pure decoder width isn't enough to tell you everything. X86 has some commonly used ridiculously compact instructions (e.g. lea) that would turn into 2-3 instructions on most other architectures.
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The overwhelming majority is due to the power management software, yes. Other ARM laptops do not get anywhere close to the same battery life. The MNT Reform with 8x 18650s (24000mAh, 3x what you get an MBP) gets about 5h of battery life with light usage.
Other ARM laptops also have much worse SoCs, so it's not really apples-to-apples.
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Windows 10 introduced memory compression. Here's a discussion from 2015 [0]. And one on Linux by IBM from 2013 [1]. But the history goes way back [2]. I don't know why that '8GiB is great!' -- no, no it isn't. Your memory usage just spills over to swap faster. It isn't more efficient (not with those 16KiB pages). [0] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/shows/Seth-Juarez/Memory-C... [1] https://events.static.linuxfound.…
Yes, I'm aware that Windows has memory compression, so let's think about why it's less successful and Windows systems need more memory than Macs. The Apple version has a very high-performance hardware implementation versus Microsoft's software implementation (not a slam on Microsoft, they just have to support more hardware). The Apple designers can assume a higher performance baseline memory subsystem because, again,…
You seem to be under the mistaken impression that Microsoft cannot gear Windows to act differently based on the installed hardware (or processor). That's quite untrue.
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The OS matters, and I would guess you were using two different OSes? I have no doubt macOS running on an m1 is more optimized than whatever you were using on the ryzen. I recently had to remove Windows completely from a few years old laptop with an 12th gen cpu and a Intel Iris / GeForce RTX 3060 Mobile combo because it was running very hot (90c+) and the fans were constantly running. Running Linux, I have no issues.…
OS does matter, with Linux my M1 macbook gets kinda hot and it cannot do more than 1.5-2h of google meetings with cameras on. IIRC google meetings on macos were at least a bit more efficient. Though it has definitely been getting better in the last 1.5 years using Asahi Linux and in some areas it is a better experience than most laptops running Linux (sound, cameras, etc.). The developers even wrote a full fledged ph…
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> Apple has a max-efficiency design that's excellent for personal computing. Intel/AMD have aging max-performance designs that do beat Apple at absolute peak... Can you explain then, how come switching from Intel MBP to Apple Silicon MBP feels like literally everything is 3x faster, the laptop barely heats up at peak load, and you never hear the fans? Going back to my Intel MBP is like going back to stone age computi…
If you take a peak-performance-optimized design (the Intel CPU) and throttle it down to low power levels, it will be slower than a design optimized for low power (the Apple CPU). "let's compare oranges to oranges" That's impossible because Apple has bought up most of TSMC's 3nm production capacity. You could try to approximate by comparing Apple M4 Max against NVIDIA B300 but that'll be a very one-sided win for NVIDI…
Have you not heard that Intel's Lunar Lake is made on the same TSMC 3nm process as Apple's M3? It's not at all "impossible" to make a fair and relevant comparison here.
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> Personally I do not entirely buy it. Intel and AMD have had plenty of years to catch up to Apple's M-architecture and they still aren't able to touch it in efficiency. The PC Snapdragon chips AFAIK also offer better performance-per-watt than AMD or Intel, with laptops offering them often having 10-30% longer battery life at similar performance. Do not conflate battery life with core efficiency. If you want to measu…
> If you want to measure how efficient a CPU core is you do so under full load. Higher wattage gives diminishing returns. Chips will run higher wattage under full load just to eke out a marginal improvement in performance. Therefore efficiency improves if the manufacturer chooses to limit the chip rather than pushing it harder. Test efficiency using whatever task the chip will be used for. For most ultralight laptops…
To further hammer the point home, let me reduce do a reductio ad absurdum: The chip is still "in use" when its asleep. Sleeping your laptop is a typical usecase. Therefore how much power is used while sleeping is a good measure of ISA efficiency. This is of course absurd because the CPU cores are entirely turned off when sleeping, they could draw 1kW with potato performance and nothing in this measurement would change.
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I think the m chips have much wider databus so bandwith is much higher as well as lower latency?
huh, it seems like the M4 pro can hit >400GB/s of RAM bandwidth whereas even a 9950x hits only 100GB/s. I'm curious how that is; in practice it "feels" like my 9950x is much more efficient at "move tons of RAM" tasks like a duckDB workload above a M4. But then again a 9950x has other advantages going on like AVX512 I guess?
You can get 8-RAM-channel motherboards and CPUs and have 400 GB/s of DDR5 too, but you pay a price for the modularity and capacity over it all being integrated and soldered. DIMMs will also have worse latency than soldered chips and have a max clock speed penalty due to signal degradation at the copper contacts. A Threadripper Pro 9955WX is $1649, a WRX90 motherboard is around $1200, and 8x16GB sticks of DDR5 RDIMMS is around $1200, $2300 for 8x32GB, $3700 for 8x64GB sticks, $6000 for 8x96GB.
It's not the ISA. Modern Macbooks are power-efficient because they have: - RAM on package - PMIC power delivery - Better power management by OS Geekerwan investigated this a while ago, see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z0tNtMwYrGA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b3FTtvPcc2s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ymoiWv9BF7Q Intel and AMD have implemented these improvements with Lunar Lake and Strix Halo. You can buy an x…
Intel and AMD have implemented these improvements with Lunar Lake and Strix Halo. You can buy an x86 laptop with Macbook-like efficiency right now if you know which SoCs to pick. M4 is about 3.6x more efficient than Strix Halo when under load.[0] On a daily basis, this difference can be more because Apple Silicon has true big.Little cores that send low priority tasks to the highly efficient small cores. For Lunar Lak…
AMD and Intel chips run on loads of different hardware. On the other hand Apple is fully in control of what hardware (and software) their chips are used with. I don't know, but I assume there's a whole lot of tuning and optimizations that you can do when you don't have to support anything besides what you produce yourself.
Let's say it would hypothethically possible to put an M4 in a regular pc. Wouldn't it lose performance just by doing that?
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> Personally I do not entirely buy it. Intel and AMD have had plenty of years to catch up to Apple's M-architecture and they still aren't able to touch it in efficiency. The PC Snapdragon chips AFAIK also offer better performance-per-watt than AMD or Intel, with laptops offering them often having 10-30% longer battery life at similar performance. Do not conflate battery life with core efficiency. If you want to measu…
To me it's not as simple as comparing the efficiency under full load. I imagine the efficiency on x86 as some kind of log curve, which translates to higher power consumption even on lighter loads. Apple's ARM implementation tends to eat a lot less power on tasks that happen most of the time, hence greatly improving the battery life. I've tried a Ryzen 7 that had a similar efficiency to an M1 according to some tests,…
My guess is ARM64 is a few percent more efficient, something AMD has claimed in the past. They're now saying it would be identical, which is probably not far from the truth.
The simple fact of the matter is that the ISA is only a small part of how long your battery lasts. If you're gaming or rendering or compiling it's going to matter a lot, and Apple battery life is pretty comparable in these scenarios. If you're reading, writing, browsing or watching then your cores are going to be mostly idle, so the only thing the ISA influences won't even have a current running through it.
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Intel and AMD have implemented these improvements with Lunar Lake and Strix Halo. You can buy an x86 laptop with Macbook-like efficiency right now if you know which SoCs to pick. M4 is about 3.6x more efficient than Strix Halo when under load.[0] On a daily basis, this difference can be more because Apple Silicon has true big.Little cores that send low priority tasks to the highly efficient small cores. For Lunar Lak…
Can somebody who knows about this stuff, please elaborate on if it's 'fair' in the first place to compare apple chips with amd/intel chips? AMD and Intel chips run on loads of different hardware. On the other hand Apple is fully in control of what hardware (and software) their chips are used with. I don't know, but I assume there's a whole lot of tuning and optimizations that you can do when you don't have to support…
Let's say it would hypothethically possible to put an M4 in a regular pc. Wouldn't it lose performance just by doing that?