34 ms·

The author is bashing another author for not doing measurements, yet himself declares that m1 beats all the other CPUs, without providing any measurements. Wit

by 6d65 6y ago

The author is bashing another author for not doing measurements, yet himself declares that m1 beats all the other CPUs, without providing any measurements. With regards to the M1, I'm grateful for a good competition. As this will likely push premium laptop manufactures (Razer, Dell) towards ryzen CPUs, as opposed to using them in cheaper models. Loosening the grip that intel has on them. With Zen3 on mobile, giving a similar 20% boost as it did on desktop, plus a jump from 7nm to to 5m, giving another 20%, next year might be a very good year for Ryzen laptops. Looking forward to a Ryzen 6000 XPS 13. The other thing I'm grateful for M1 is that will most likely push the laptop manufactures to pay attention to thermals and noise. The unpleasant thing, is that most likely Apple will be a process node ahead, with them most likely getting TSMC 3nm in 2022, and everyone else a year later. With a competitive year in-between. I'm looking forward to next year, to upgrading to a Ryzen 6000(5nm) cpu, if it's good. And I'm looking forward for the more beefy apple arm chips and comparison between them. Also, maybe someone would compare a Ryzen 6000 hackintosh with an arm mac while it will be possible. Also looking forward at Intel's response, be it a partnership with TSMC, or fixing their nodes, and, fingers crossed, a completely new risc-v cpu. Anyway, interesting stuff.

GekkePrutser 6y ago
Yeah John Gruber has really become a shill over the last few years. His article reads like an Apple keynote transcript, everything is magical and amazing, a marvel and mindbogglingly great. No wonder they throw him so many exclusives ;) Yes M1 is great. But it's a closed system (no booting Linux or Windows at this time) and even under macOS you're having even less access to the system's internals than before. Also, Apple performs many tricks to get such long battery life, such as putting apps to sleep when you're not looking at them (app nap). I find this extremely irritating when working with my Mac but I can't turn it off completely even though I have a mini and thus battery life is not a factor at all. My work MacBook spends it entire life docked with the screen closed too. M1 is a solid platform for sure, better for laptops than intel/amd's offerings. I agree. But I'm getting enough of Apple's (and Gruber's) hypey marketing. It's not magic, just good engineering. I stopped watching their keynotes for the same reason.
- ravi-delia 6y ago
  The M1 as a computer is too locked down for me, and it seems like for you. But the M1 as a demonstration of the power of modern ARM chips is absolutely unmatched. I have seen a lot of people use the lockdown argument to justify a disregard of ARM overall without realizing that no, the open version of this technology will be incredible.
  - GekkePrutser 6y ago
    Oh I'm not against ARM at all. In fact I have many systems running it :) Raspberries but also a Pinebook. I'm also getting an M1 mini from work. I just don't like the almost-religious overhyping of everything Apple. They're doing a great job. They're not perfect. For example: Moorhead makes a good point IMO. Yes he's talking about software issues. But in the case of Apple, you can't separate those two. The OS doesn't work on other hardware and (in this case) the hardware doesn't work with other OSes. This works to their (huge) advantage in some cases, being able to optimise each component perfectly. But it can be a drawback too like it is here.
    - Zancarius 6y ago
      > I just don't like the almost-religious overhyping of everything Apple. They're doing a great job. They're not perfect. I'm in the same boat as you and the other OP up-thread. I'm amazed by what M1 has accomplished, but less so because of what it represents for itself (and for Apple) and more that it shows ARM is capable of. As an architecture, ARM is impressing the Hell out of me as of late. Sure, it's not touching Intel and AMD in terms of raw performance, but once you start looking at the performance-per-watt, the story is absolutely different. x86's power budget is looking awfully bloated by comparison. What happens if NVIDIA's acquisition of ARM goes through? Do they start producing their own CPUs?
      - sjwright 6y ago
        In your quest to avoid almost-religious overhyping of everything Apple, I'd contend that you're presenting the inverse: almost-religious anti-hyping of everything Apple. We can criticise them for their seemingly blinkered focus on casual consumers and end-users at the expense of developers and technologists without finding ways to rationalise away anything good Apple does. Attributing the positive aspects of M1 to the ARM micro-architecture is contemporary revisionism. If micro-architecture was the key differentiator, Microsoft Surface RT would have been a runaway success and Qualcomm would have taken over the notebook CPU market by now. Little of what makes the M1 so impressive has anything to do with the ARM instruction set. The impressive parts are things like the entirely in-house GPU and the mild hardware acceleration of Rosetta 2. It's also worth noting that Apple has been deeply involved in ARM since the late 1980s. They were a co-founder of Advanced RISC Machines Ltd. along with Acorn and VLSI. Apple were deeply involved in development of the ARM6 architecture and the Apple Newton was one of the first major commercial applications. So even if you limit your amazement to the ARM architecture, a portion of that credit goes to Apple anyway.
Scarbutt 6y ago
Regarding hardware, will Dell be able to compete with a MBA at the $1000 price point? I doubt it.
- 6d65 6y ago
  If it will cut into their sales they might have to adapt. Also, from what I heard, while intel was on top, it was charging outrageous margins on its CPUs. AMD mobile were said to be hundreds of dollars less per cpu. The manufacturers might choose to pass on these savings. Of course, if AMD becomes the only game in town, they might jack up their prices as well. We'll see.
  - mbreese 6y ago
    I didn't really think about it at the time, but Nvidia buying ARM makes even more sense now that Apple has shown what can be done with ARM CPUs. Not necessarily because Nvidia wanted a CPU, but because otherwise, they'd be stuck providing GPUs for Intel CPU systems. AMD can bundle Radeon GPUs and Apple has the M1 CPU/GPU. That means that for a system vendor (Dell), the only cost effective place to use an Nvidia GPU would be in an Intel system. And if those are already more expensive, then that market will be shrinking. However, with Apple showing the viability of ARM for desktop / laptop use, this opens a whole new market up for Nvidia/ARM. Apple has already shown it is a viable approach hardware wise, so half of the work is done. So, an ARM powered Dell laptop might not be too far off.
    - 6d65 6y ago
      You're right, it could be that Nvidia will push for more beefed up cortex CPUs, with the same tricks employed in m1, like larger L1/l2 caches, increasing the die size, and add more complex pipelines, put the ram on the soc, and an Nvidia gpu. The potential problems are. - This might take some time, if it's not already in progress. And pc manufactures might not afford lower sales for a few years while this happens. - Windows seems to still have issues with app portability and emulation. But who knows, maybe MS will push harder - Making their own chips and also licensing cores to vendors like Qualcomm, might spook them. It's not a good position to compete with someone who owns the IP you depend one. This might be a good thing for RISC-V But we'll find out in a year or two what is the play. Competition is good for everyone. That's why I don't like apple having exclusive access to new nodes, be it because apple is willing to pay premium, or that other companies avoid low yield. Anyway, seems like TSMC will have their hands full for a few cycles.
least 6y ago
> With regards to the M1, I'm grateful for a good competition. As this will likely push premium laptop manufactures (Razer, Dell) towards ryzen CPUs, as opposed to using them in cheaper models. Loosening the grip that intel has on them. In the past this has not been the case due to Intel's anticompetitive practices and while I think it's good to be cautiously optimistic, I would also not be surprised to not see no-compromise flagship notebooks with ryzen in them from the larger pc manufacturers.
- Kopiks 6y ago
  This is a unique situation though. Intel is now years behind in their process nodes. Ryzen right now is already significantly better than any Intel CPU. M1 has been released which trounces all of those and PC manufacturers now have to compete with Apple in a way that they haven't really before. I don't remember Apple ever being this competitive in performance and they're going to take the lead once the Macbook Pros are released. The only way for manufacturers to keep up is a top-to-bottom switch to Ryzen. So I do think we're going to see a big shift towards Ryzen, since I'm not sure how Intel could possibly entice manufacturers to stick with them when they haven't been able to deliver in years.
- MrBuddyCasino 6y ago
  > As this will likely push premium laptop manufactures (Razer, Dell) towards ryzen CPUs, as opposed to using them in cheaper models. For that to happen, AMD needs to be able to ship high volumes, and keep that promise. Right now, they can’t deliver, most of the volume booked at TSMC goes towards the console SoCs.
ogre_codes 6y ago
> The author is bashing another author for not doing measurements That is a poor characterization of this article. Gruber's critic of Moorhead's article doesn't reference a lack of benchmarks or measurements at all.
- compiler-guy 6y ago
  Gruber has also cited plenty of benchmarks in other posts. So he didn’t on this one. So what?
bfgoodrich 6y ago
Intel's 10nm is approximately equal to TSMC's 7nm (even having advantages in some areas). The A-chips at 7nm (the A13) were already significantly ahead of Intel's offerings in efficiency and instructions per cycle. Intel went all in on a design that relegates performance to power gobbling turbo boost and here we are. Just generally too much is made about node size. It isn't a magic pixie dust that you can sprinkle on a chip. I certainly don't want to engage in chip advocacy wars, but it has been interesting seeing the goalposts moving. Last year it was just that Apple had some easily replicated, lazy big cache that was their key to performance, that's if you accept that it's actually high performance because Something Something Geekbench is a big lie and they're actual miserable performers. Now it's just node size. Super simple, trivial things that somehow discount what they're delivering.
- ogre_codes 6y ago
  > Last year it was just that Apple had some easily replicated It feels like if you listen to the peanut gallery, Apple CPU advantage is always easy to replicate. They said the same thing when Apple bumped the A series to 64 bits and at pretty much every step between. If Apple's formula was easy to copy or as obvious as everyone seems to claim, then we wouldn't be in the position where Apple has the best mobile CPU, the best wearable CPU, the best tablet CPU, and the best ultrabook CPU.
  - ntsplnkv2 6y ago
    Apple always gets people riled up on here, it's one of the few areas on HN that discussions just get rather poor quickly. > If Apple's formula was easy to copy or as obvious as everyone seems to claim, then we wouldn't be in the position where Apple has the best mobile CPU, the best wearable CPU, the best tablet CPU, and the best ultrabook CPU. Exactly. It isn't easy to do. Apple is in a unique position to push their platform to the absolute limit because of their vertical integration. And while that sacrifices openness, most people buying laptops just don't care.
    - ogre_codes 6y ago
      > And while that sacrifices openness, most people buying laptops just don't care. This is it in a nutshell. I used Linux as my web development platform because I could immerse myself in Unix on both the server and client (Something you still can't do well in Windows FWIW). When OS X moved to Intel, suddenly I could live and breath something very close to my server side Linux setup on my desktop and have a fuss-free OS. Open is nice, but performance & just being able to get my job done effectively is much more important.
grecy 6y ago
> With Zen3 on mobile, giving a similar 20% boost as it did on desktop, plus a jump from 7nm to to 5m, giving another 20%, next year might be a very good year for Ryzen laptops. You're making the classic mistake of comparing what might be coming at some undetermined time in the future to what you can walk into the store and buy right now.
- sudosysgen 6y ago
  You can walk into a store, buy a Zen 3 processor right now (if you're lucky, they're in high demand), fiddle with the clocks and voltages to simulate (poorly) a laptop chip, and notice that, right now, at the same power, a Zen3 core at 7nm HPP is comporable in single core performance to a single M1 big core on 5nm LPP. So right now we know that Zen 3 is more or less equivalent or even ahead in architectural power efficiency. You do have to wait for 5nm LPP to see it pull ahead or use it in a laptop, yes. But the statement that M1 is well ahead of the competition is clearly false. It's competitive. As for multicore performance, it's already matched by Zen 2 parts.
  - grecy 6y ago
    So why can't we walk in and buy a Zen 3 in a laptop right now? .... because the thermals and engineering have not been designed/completed yet. Sometime in the future they will be, which is great. But that's the future. I'm still talking about right now. I like to buy things that actually exist and work today, not things that hypothetically work well in the future.
    - sudosysgen 6y ago
      Well, no. The reason you can't buy one right now is because there is no 5nm TSMC capacity left to build them.
      - grecy 6y ago
        But you said I can get a 7nm one that is pretty close to the same thing. Why don't they sell me one of those in a laptop ready to go?
ricardobeat 6y ago
Multiple rounds of 20% improvement will still not give you the performance jump brought by M1. It takes tasks that were simply unthinkable on a light laptop and not only makes them possible but manages to beat something like a 10-core i9 [1], in a machine without a fan. [1] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/11/mac-mini-and-apple-silicon-m1-review-not-so-crazy-after-all/3/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/11/mac-mini-and-apple-s...
- neogodless 6y ago
  How quickly we forget... the 10-core i9 was being embarrassed by AMD's Zen 2 mobile processors this spring. https://www.notebookcheck.net/10-core-Intel-Core-i9-10900F-desktop-CPU-does-well-in-Geekbench-multi-core-test-but-then-gets-put-to-shame-by-8-core-AMD-Ryzen-9-4900HS-mobile-APU.461162.0.html https://www.notebookcheck.net/10-core-Intel-Core-i9-10900F-d... Looks like single core Zen 3 scores about 2100 on Geekbench 5. M1 scores about 1700. https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/singlecore https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/singlecore https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&q=Apple+M1 https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&q... I'm confused why we feel like AMD Zen 3 has to "catch up" when it it's 29% ahead. Yes I get it, per watt, battery life. The M1 is awesome for those metrics. But AMD chips have more "absolute" power. So you pick the one that is better for your needs - very powerful portability, or simply ultimate total performance (or something in between).
  - czhiddy 6y ago
    Those 2000+ scores are from hobbyist enthusiasts overclocking the Zen 3 CPUs, with elaborate liquid nitrogen cooling setups at the highest scores. Stock Zen3 single core scores average around 1650: https://browser.geekbench.com/processor-benchmarks https://browser.geekbench.com/processor-benchmarks
    - sgerenser 6y ago
      There also appears to be an awful lot of them running MacOS which doesn’t really make sense (overclockers with bleeding edge Ryzen systems don’t have a lot of overlap with the Hackintosh crowd). Seems like it might be at least partially a data error.
coldtea 6y ago
>The author is bashing another author for not doing measurements, yet himself declares that m1 beats all the other CPUs, without providing any measurements. That's because there are plenty of measurements published, which agree with the author, and disagree with the "another author".
- andrewprock 6y ago
  The published benchmarks are mostly "meh" when it comes to anything at the prosumer level and above. The insanely good thermals and 5mm process make M1 a great laptop, but middling performance and a lack of expansion only makes it decent mini-desktop for family use. If the rumors of the M1x prove true, that might be the first real pro-level ARM CPU. For pro-level performance, it's roughly matching AMD's three-year-old entry-level Ryzen 7 1700: https://openbenchmarking.org/vs/Processor/Apple%20M1,AMD%20Ryzen%207%201700%20Eight-Core,AMD%20Ryzen%207%202700X%20Eight-Core,AMD%20Ryzen%207%203800XT%208-Core,AMD%20Ryzen%20Threadripper%203990X%2064-Core,AMD%20Ryzen%209%205950X%2016-Core,Intel%20Core%20i9-10980XE https://openbenchmarking.org/vs/Processor/Apple%20M1,AMD%20R...
  - coldtea 6y ago
    >The published benchmarks are mostly "meh" when it comes to anything at the prosumer level and above. Which makes sense, since those are the lower-speced Mac machines (Mini, Air, 13" Pro). At the level at which they compete (similarly speced Intel Mac sold until recently, Surface machines, PC laptops of the same price) they obliterate them. "meh at the prosumer level" for a consumer level machine is kinda like saying that an AMD Threadripper / 64 cores is meh as the mainframe level.
    - andrewprock 6y ago
      If the 13" Macbook Pro is not for Professional work, then I guess that makes sense.
      - wffurr 6y ago
ralfd 6y ago
Sometimes Gruber calls people out for their bad commentary and it comes across as being superior. This time, though, this article was very much needed. Moorhead’s article got a lot of traction, and ‘felt’ serious enough that a lot of folks would be dissuaded from the M1 Macs.
prvc 6y ago
What are the prospects for a hypothetical future fanless Ryzen laptop?

by 6d65 6y ago

GekkePrutser 6y ago

Yeah John Gruber has really become a shill over the last few years. His article reads like an Apple keynote transcript, everything is magical and amazing, a marvel and mindbogglingly great. No wonder they throw him so many exclusives ;) Yes M1 is great. But it's a closed system (no booting Linux or Windows at this time) and even under macOS you're having even less access to the system's internals than before. Also, Apple performs many tricks to get such long battery life, such as putting apps to sleep when you're not looking at them (app nap). I find this extremely irritating when working with my Mac but I can't turn it off completely even though I have a mini and thus battery life is not a factor at all. My work MacBook spends it entire life docked with the screen closed too. M1 is a solid platform for sure, better for laptops than intel/amd's offerings. I agree. But I'm getting enough of Apple's (and Gruber's) hypey marketing. It's not magic, just good engineering. I stopped watching their keynotes for the same reason.

ravi-delia 6y ago
The M1 as a computer is too locked down for me, and it seems like for you. But the M1 as a demonstration of the power of modern ARM chips is absolutely unmatched. I have seen a lot of people use the lockdown argument to justify a disregard of ARM overall without realizing that no, the open version of this technology will be incredible.
- GekkePrutser 6y ago
  Oh I'm not against ARM at all. In fact I have many systems running it :) Raspberries but also a Pinebook. I'm also getting an M1 mini from work. I just don't like the almost-religious overhyping of everything Apple. They're doing a great job. They're not perfect. For example: Moorhead makes a good point IMO. Yes he's talking about software issues. But in the case of Apple, you can't separate those two. The OS doesn't work on other hardware and (in this case) the hardware doesn't work with other OSes. This works to their (huge) advantage in some cases, being able to optimise each component perfectly. But it can be a drawback too like it is here.
  - Zancarius 6y ago
    > I just don't like the almost-religious overhyping of everything Apple. They're doing a great job. They're not perfect. I'm in the same boat as you and the other OP up-thread. I'm amazed by what M1 has accomplished, but less so because of what it represents for itself (and for Apple) and more that it shows ARM is capable of. As an architecture, ARM is impressing the Hell out of me as of late. Sure, it's not touching Intel and AMD in terms of raw performance, but once you start looking at the performance-per-watt, the story is absolutely different. x86's power budget is looking awfully bloated by comparison. What happens if NVIDIA's acquisition of ARM goes through? Do they start producing their own CPUs?
    - sjwright 6y ago
      In your quest to avoid almost-religious overhyping of everything Apple, I'd contend that you're presenting the inverse: almost-religious anti-hyping of everything Apple. We can criticise them for their seemingly blinkered focus on casual consumers and end-users at the expense of developers and technologists without finding ways to rationalise away anything good Apple does. Attributing the positive aspects of M1 to the ARM micro-architecture is contemporary revisionism. If micro-architecture was the key differentiator, Microsoft Surface RT would have been a runaway success and Qualcomm would have taken over the notebook CPU market by now. Little of what makes the M1 so impressive has anything to do with the ARM instruction set. The impressive parts are things like the entirely in-house GPU and the mild hardware acceleration of Rosetta 2. It's also worth noting that Apple has been deeply involved in ARM since the late 1980s. They were a co-founder of Advanced RISC Machines Ltd. along with Acorn and VLSI. Apple were deeply involved in development of the ARM6 architecture and the Apple Newton was one of the first major commercial applications. So even if you limit your amazement to the ARM architecture, a portion of that credit goes to Apple anyway.

Scarbutt 6y ago

Regarding hardware, will Dell be able to compete with a MBA at the $1000 price point? I doubt it.

6d65 6y ago
If it will cut into their sales they might have to adapt. Also, from what I heard, while intel was on top, it was charging outrageous margins on its CPUs. AMD mobile were said to be hundreds of dollars less per cpu. The manufacturers might choose to pass on these savings. Of course, if AMD becomes the only game in town, they might jack up their prices as well. We'll see.
- mbreese 6y ago
  I didn't really think about it at the time, but Nvidia buying ARM makes even more sense now that Apple has shown what can be done with ARM CPUs. Not necessarily because Nvidia wanted a CPU, but because otherwise, they'd be stuck providing GPUs for Intel CPU systems. AMD can bundle Radeon GPUs and Apple has the M1 CPU/GPU. That means that for a system vendor (Dell), the only cost effective place to use an Nvidia GPU would be in an Intel system. And if those are already more expensive, then that market will be shrinking. However, with Apple showing the viability of ARM for desktop / laptop use, this opens a whole new market up for Nvidia/ARM. Apple has already shown it is a viable approach hardware wise, so half of the work is done. So, an ARM powered Dell laptop might not be too far off.
  - 6d65 6y ago
    You're right, it could be that Nvidia will push for more beefed up cortex CPUs, with the same tricks employed in m1, like larger L1/l2 caches, increasing the die size, and add more complex pipelines, put the ram on the soc, and an Nvidia gpu. The potential problems are. - This might take some time, if it's not already in progress. And pc manufactures might not afford lower sales for a few years while this happens. - Windows seems to still have issues with app portability and emulation. But who knows, maybe MS will push harder - Making their own chips and also licensing cores to vendors like Qualcomm, might spook them. It's not a good position to compete with someone who owns the IP you depend one. This might be a good thing for RISC-V But we'll find out in a year or two what is the play. Competition is good for everyone. That's why I don't like apple having exclusive access to new nodes, be it because apple is willing to pay premium, or that other companies avoid low yield. Anyway, seems like TSMC will have their hands full for a few cycles.

least 6y ago

> With regards to the M1, I'm grateful for a good competition. As this will likely push premium laptop manufactures (Razer, Dell) towards ryzen CPUs, as opposed to using them in cheaper models. Loosening the grip that intel has on them. In the past this has not been the case due to Intel's anticompetitive practices and while I think it's good to be cautiously optimistic, I would also not be surprised to not see no-compromise flagship notebooks with ryzen in them from the larger pc manufacturers.

Kopiks 6y ago
This is a unique situation though. Intel is now years behind in their process nodes. Ryzen right now is already significantly better than any Intel CPU. M1 has been released which trounces all of those and PC manufacturers now have to compete with Apple in a way that they haven't really before. I don't remember Apple ever being this competitive in performance and they're going to take the lead once the Macbook Pros are released. The only way for manufacturers to keep up is a top-to-bottom switch to Ryzen. So I do think we're going to see a big shift towards Ryzen, since I'm not sure how Intel could possibly entice manufacturers to stick with them when they haven't been able to deliver in years.
MrBuddyCasino 6y ago
> As this will likely push premium laptop manufactures (Razer, Dell) towards ryzen CPUs, as opposed to using them in cheaper models. For that to happen, AMD needs to be able to ship high volumes, and keep that promise. Right now, they can’t deliver, most of the volume booked at TSMC goes towards the console SoCs.

ogre_codes 6y ago

> The author is bashing another author for not doing measurements That is a poor characterization of this article. Gruber's critic of Moorhead's article doesn't reference a lack of benchmarks or measurements at all.

compiler-guy 6y ago
Gruber has also cited plenty of benchmarks in other posts. So he didn’t on this one. So what?

bfgoodrich 6y ago

Intel's 10nm is approximately equal to TSMC's 7nm (even having advantages in some areas). The A-chips at 7nm (the A13) were already significantly ahead of Intel's offerings in efficiency and instructions per cycle. Intel went all in on a design that relegates performance to power gobbling turbo boost and here we are. Just generally too much is made about node size. It isn't a magic pixie dust that you can sprinkle on a chip. I certainly don't want to engage in chip advocacy wars, but it has been interesting seeing the goalposts moving. Last year it was just that Apple had some easily replicated, lazy big cache that was their key to performance, that's if you accept that it's actually high performance because Something Something Geekbench is a big lie and they're actual miserable performers. Now it's just node size. Super simple, trivial things that somehow discount what they're delivering.

ogre_codes 6y ago
> Last year it was just that Apple had some easily replicated It feels like if you listen to the peanut gallery, Apple CPU advantage is always easy to replicate. They said the same thing when Apple bumped the A series to 64 bits and at pretty much every step between. If Apple's formula was easy to copy or as obvious as everyone seems to claim, then we wouldn't be in the position where Apple has the best mobile CPU, the best wearable CPU, the best tablet CPU, and the best ultrabook CPU.
- ntsplnkv2 6y ago
  Apple always gets people riled up on here, it's one of the few areas on HN that discussions just get rather poor quickly. > If Apple's formula was easy to copy or as obvious as everyone seems to claim, then we wouldn't be in the position where Apple has the best mobile CPU, the best wearable CPU, the best tablet CPU, and the best ultrabook CPU. Exactly. It isn't easy to do. Apple is in a unique position to push their platform to the absolute limit because of their vertical integration. And while that sacrifices openness, most people buying laptops just don't care.
  - ogre_codes 6y ago
    > And while that sacrifices openness, most people buying laptops just don't care. This is it in a nutshell. I used Linux as my web development platform because I could immerse myself in Unix on both the server and client (Something you still can't do well in Windows FWIW). When OS X moved to Intel, suddenly I could live and breath something very close to my server side Linux setup on my desktop and have a fuss-free OS. Open is nice, but performance & just being able to get my job done effectively is much more important.

grecy 6y ago

> With Zen3 on mobile, giving a similar 20% boost as it did on desktop, plus a jump from 7nm to to 5m, giving another 20%, next year might be a very good year for Ryzen laptops. You're making the classic mistake of comparing what might be coming at some undetermined time in the future to what you can walk into the store and buy right now.

sudosysgen 6y ago
You can walk into a store, buy a Zen 3 processor right now (if you're lucky, they're in high demand), fiddle with the clocks and voltages to simulate (poorly) a laptop chip, and notice that, right now, at the same power, a Zen3 core at 7nm HPP is comporable in single core performance to a single M1 big core on 5nm LPP. So right now we know that Zen 3 is more or less equivalent or even ahead in architectural power efficiency. You do have to wait for 5nm LPP to see it pull ahead or use it in a laptop, yes. But the statement that M1 is well ahead of the competition is clearly false. It's competitive. As for multicore performance, it's already matched by Zen 2 parts.
- grecy 6y ago
  So why can't we walk in and buy a Zen 3 in a laptop right now? .... because the thermals and engineering have not been designed/completed yet. Sometime in the future they will be, which is great. But that's the future. I'm still talking about right now. I like to buy things that actually exist and work today, not things that hypothetically work well in the future.
  - sudosysgen 6y ago
    Well, no. The reason you can't buy one right now is because there is no 5nm TSMC capacity left to build them.
    - grecy 6y ago
      But you said I can get a 7nm one that is pretty close to the same thing. Why don't they sell me one of those in a laptop ready to go?

ricardobeat 6y ago

Multiple rounds of 20% improvement will still not give you the performance jump brought by M1. It takes tasks that were simply unthinkable on a light laptop and not only makes them possible but manages to beat something like a 10-core i9 [1], in a machine without a fan. [1] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/11/mac-mini-and-apple-silicon-m1-review-not-so-crazy-after-all/3/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/11/mac-mini-and-apple-s...

neogodless 6y ago
How quickly we forget... the 10-core i9 was being embarrassed by AMD's Zen 2 mobile processors this spring. https://www.notebookcheck.net/10-core-Intel-Core-i9-10900F-desktop-CPU-does-well-in-Geekbench-multi-core-test-but-then-gets-put-to-shame-by-8-core-AMD-Ryzen-9-4900HS-mobile-APU.461162.0.html https://www.notebookcheck.net/10-core-Intel-Core-i9-10900F-d... Looks like single core Zen 3 scores about 2100 on Geekbench 5. M1 scores about 1700. https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/singlecore https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/singlecore https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&q=Apple+M1 https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&q... I'm confused why we feel like AMD Zen 3 has to "catch up" when it it's 29% ahead. Yes I get it, per watt, battery life. The M1 is awesome for those metrics. But AMD chips have more "absolute" power. So you pick the one that is better for your needs - very powerful portability, or simply ultimate total performance (or something in between).
- czhiddy 6y ago
  Those 2000+ scores are from hobbyist enthusiasts overclocking the Zen 3 CPUs, with elaborate liquid nitrogen cooling setups at the highest scores. Stock Zen3 single core scores average around 1650: https://browser.geekbench.com/processor-benchmarks https://browser.geekbench.com/processor-benchmarks
  - sgerenser 6y ago
    There also appears to be an awful lot of them running MacOS which doesn’t really make sense (overclockers with bleeding edge Ryzen systems don’t have a lot of overlap with the Hackintosh crowd). Seems like it might be at least partially a data error.

coldtea 6y ago

>The author is bashing another author for not doing measurements, yet himself declares that m1 beats all the other CPUs, without providing any measurements. That's because there are plenty of measurements published, which agree with the author, and disagree with the "another author".

andrewprock 6y ago
The published benchmarks are mostly "meh" when it comes to anything at the prosumer level and above. The insanely good thermals and 5mm process make M1 a great laptop, but middling performance and a lack of expansion only makes it decent mini-desktop for family use. If the rumors of the M1x prove true, that might be the first real pro-level ARM CPU. For pro-level performance, it's roughly matching AMD's three-year-old entry-level Ryzen 7 1700: https://openbenchmarking.org/vs/Processor/Apple%20M1,AMD%20Ryzen%207%201700%20Eight-Core,AMD%20Ryzen%207%202700X%20Eight-Core,AMD%20Ryzen%207%203800XT%208-Core,AMD%20Ryzen%20Threadripper%203990X%2064-Core,AMD%20Ryzen%209%205950X%2016-Core,Intel%20Core%20i9-10980XE https://openbenchmarking.org/vs/Processor/Apple%20M1,AMD%20R...
- coldtea 6y ago
  >The published benchmarks are mostly "meh" when it comes to anything at the prosumer level and above. Which makes sense, since those are the lower-speced Mac machines (Mini, Air, 13" Pro). At the level at which they compete (similarly speced Intel Mac sold until recently, Surface machines, PC laptops of the same price) they obliterate them. "meh at the prosumer level" for a consumer level machine is kinda like saying that an AMD Threadripper / 64 cores is meh as the mainframe level.
  - andrewprock 6y ago
    If the 13" Macbook Pro is not for Professional work, then I guess that makes sense.
    - wffurr 6y ago

ralfd 6y ago

Sometimes Gruber calls people out for their bad commentary and it comes across as being superior. This time, though, this article was very much needed. Moorhead’s article got a lot of traction, and ‘felt’ serious enough that a lot of folks would be dissuaded from the M1 Macs.

prvc 6y ago

What are the prospects for a hypothetical future fanless Ryzen laptop?