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> 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.

> hard in perf and price benchmarks

I just showed you that Apple is equal or better in terms of single core performance. This thread is a bunch of childish fanboy nonsense, attaching egos to some brand of CPU manufacturer and ignoring actual benchmarks.

Personally I don't care about $20 price differences. On a developer salary who gives a shit about price? I own Apple, Intel, and AMD cpus. They're all good.

Price cannot be compared because we do not know the price of an Apple processor. In fact, Passmark does not include Apple processors in their "best value" listings [0]

[0] https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu_value_available.html

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.

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