Can Intel finally beat ARM on performance per Watt?

I want to say I’ve broken every headphone jack I ever had. Yanking on them, debris getting in the switch, debris triggering the optical if it had one. 3.5 was never a great design. Too many physical ways for it to break, from static from a loose connection, debris stuck inside like pebbles getting jammed, debris stuck under the switch preventing recognition. False positive or accidental triggers that take a while to track down why the speakers are muted.

Of all the parts on electronics I have owned i would put headphone jack just behind power supply for least reliable and that it was set to override digital settings when something was connected felt like a loss of control.

I am very forgetful, wireless has been a godsend by comparison and I don’t get hurt with cable snags. I’d pay extra to remove it before shipping if it were an option.

I think they probably just aren't used much any more. Plus if you really need one you can get a tiny dongle for virtually no money that will probably better sound quality anyway.

I have aeen usb-c bent but I have never seen 3.5 break in decades of use. Walkmans then discmans falling. Shooting back out of my chair and snagging it such that the whole tower spins unplugging ps/2 mouse. But the headphones are fine. What do you do to those poor things? The only time I have seen one fail it was on a custom pcb and the solder joint broke. A couple minutes with an iron and it was back.

If Intel is competitive with Apple again, this should be good for the customer.

Nice and organised work!

My only reservation wrt the core of it is that it tests the cpus on a matrix operations task, and power efficiency in this case refers specifically to doing matrix operations. This is fine if that's the kind of task one wants to optimise for, but it does not necessarily translate to general energy efficiency for a broader spectrum of tasks that most people may do most of the time.

And thus, if one wants to optimise for matrix operations, wouldn't it make sense to use apple's accelerate framework instead of blis/openblas (I think you used blis?)? I compiled hpl to use accelerate [0] on my m1 max (macbook), and ran it with settings almost identical to the original m1 max settings [1]. I get 422 Gflops vs 264 Gflops in m1 max mac studio (docker) [2]. My average draw (using a wall power meter, but not interfaced with computer to keep a log, just me looking at it) is around 55-57W (probably less because it peaked at 57W but the last half was getting around 52W). With the most conservative estimate of 57W, this gave a 7.4 Gflops/W which is second place, just below the m4 mac mini in the benchmark table. The m1 max in the original did 4 Gflops/W (at 66W).

So tbh I do not really trust the conclusion of the benchmark page, except if I miss sth. It is quite nice, organised work anyway.

[0] https://github.com/tycho/hpl/blob/master/setup/Make.MacOSX_A...

[1] I just fixed the p:q ratio, which was prob not really meant to be 1:10 there, I assume, also judging from the settings in the other tests. I put p=2,q=4. Also I was unable to put more than 8 processes in total.

[2] The original m1 max benchmark: https://github.com/geerlingguy/top500-benchmark/issues/4