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> Lots of people are saying that Apple chips are good only because they have the node advantage. Let's see what they can do within the same power envelope now.

Depending on what you're doing, modern AMD chips are very close to M series chips under load (specifically efficiency). The biggest issue is idle power is still higher. My amd framework (7840u) takes between 5-10watts idle unless I use something like the xtu tuner.


> specifically efficiency

AMD is already significantly faster than M series, and has been so for a long time. Efficiency is the only place Apple still has an advantage

AMD is marginally slower per core. Practically the same performance.

https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/cpus/apple-m3-cpu...

The AMD Ryzen strategy has always been many but less powerful cores.

Single core performance is only useful for artificial benchmarks. And even there Apples lead is less than 2%.

Single core performance is the primary thing that determines responsiveness for many programs.
Yet it won't matter at <2%, especially when multi-core is actually slower.
> Single core performance is only useful for artificial benchmarks

That is nonsense that none of the CPU competitors would agree with. In most applications single core performance matters very much. Not every algorithm can be multi threaded and there is an unavoidable overhead with those that can be multi threaded. Only some parts of some applications can be multi threaded.

For example, a 20 core 500 MHz CPU is much less capable and responsive for real world usage than a 5 core 2 GHz CPU, despite having the same instruction count per cycle.

A 100 core 100 Mhz CPU would take forever to boot up and feel unusably slow.

By which metric?
Whatever metric apple uses. They freely admit that their chips are less powerful. Efficiency you can look up, e.g. whatever benchmark value per watt.
Apple currently has the fastest single core performance according to Cinebench, Geekbench, and PassMark benchmarks

https://www.cpubenchmark.net/singleThread.html

What about price? it seems to be waay more expensive than competition

check e.g those

https://www.cpubenchmark.net/laptop.html

AMD and Intel beat Apple hard in perf and price benchmarks.

I'm running Cinebench 24 right now on my M3 Max, because I'm genuinely curious about that.

So far it is looking OK. In single core, it handily beats a 7900X3D at a fraction of the power draw.

Exactly. There are so many dimensions across which to evaluate it. What I care about the most is 1) ST thread (running my personal workload which is inherently single threaded), and 2) Rust compilation (MT compile/ST link).

For 1) my fastest iron is i9-13700KS and Apple M2. They are very close. My Zen 3 is great and is notably more power efficient, but I'll evaluate 14700KS-Zen 5-M3 when possible.

ADD: because of winter I'm loving my i9-13700KS (not kidding, my office would be freezing without it), but come summer I'll care about efficiency.

5w cpu only? thats a lot. If whole laptop then ok.
It's for the entire laptop, but it fluctuates rapidly and is realistically closer to 6-8w. Disclaimer, I have a USB charger with voltage/current readouts so these values are from observing that when fully charged, though AMD adrenalin reports very similar results.
I see similar with a Thinkpad P14s with 7840U. If you can, try powering off the screen and observing power draw. If I haven't confused myself, mine drops down to more like 2-3 watts in that state.

As far as I can tell, it is not enabling LCD panel self-refresh. This may be where the extra idle power is going with screen on? If you think about it, it's a pretty expensive behavior to constantly read framebuffer content out of system RAM at 60 Hz.

Are there any comparisons to Intel? Are they better on idle?

Need to purchase a new business laptop soon

I replied a longer reply to the other reply to your comment, but in terms of battery life 13th gen and lower intels are poorer to zen4 (7x4x) u series cpus, however apparently the intel hs/hx versions are slightly more efficient than their amd counterparts.

I highly recommend going through some youtube battery life videos and looking up notebook check reviews for whatever you're planning to buy/compare.

My 5 year old intel laptop routinely idles under 5W. Was 2-3W total system power draw (reported by battery) when I looked before writing this comment.

This is with a 14nm chip, one would think the newer systems could hopefully do at least this well.

Recent intel systems unfortunately often push higher power to "beat" amd on performance metrics. Single core intel perf is still higher and likely will be, but multicore and efficiency of zen 4 is generally similar if not better than intel 13th gen. 14th gen helps efficiency but is barely available. Oh, and the amd igpu is quite performant, much better than the 13th gen and lower intels.

Btw as someone with a skylake laptop that also used to sip power, I suspect there's been a mild across the board power increase especially as newer chips clock much higher. My ryzen 7 iirc goes till 5.1ghz and is noticeably faster (i'm at 392 tabs in edge right now) than my skylake. I suspect your older laptop wouldn't clock so high, and a 3ghz limited intel/amd would have great battery.

Intels historically have colder idle, except for some very specfic AMDs such 5700G, which are _really_ efficient at idle.

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