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People should stop comparing Apple Silicon to Intel and start comparing it to AMD.
by dvfjsdhgfv 6y ago
People should stop comparing Apple Silicon to Intel and start comparing it to AMD.
- snicksnak 6y agoConsidering that Apple ditched Intel for their own Apple Silicon chips it makes more sense comparing them (for now).
- dvfjsdhgfv 6y agoWell, yes, if you look back so to say, you can put an older Intel MBP and a new one with M1 side by side and get a comparison showing the latter fares better. But when you look into the future, if you are a customer considering a purchase of a new laptop with Apple Silicon, they would benefit from a comparison with the top Zen 3 offerins, even though such a comparison might be much trickier than the one with Intel.
- EricE 6y agoThe new Zen 3 offerings are indeed tantalizing. Even if you never buy an Apple Silicon Mac, the kick in the pants it has no doubt delivered to both Intel and AMD benefits all of us. And as a friend keeps reminding me, this is their cheapest entry level processor :)
- izacus 6y agoWhy? The MacBooks aren't competing against their previous iterations (since you can't buy them anymore), but against their non-Apple competition. When you'll be buying a new laptop, you won't be choosing between a 2018 MacBook and a 2021 MacBook, but between 2021 MacBook and offerings from Lenovo, Dell, Microsoft and others.
- zamadatix 6y agoThe latest 13" x86 MacBook Pro released less than 1 year ago and is still for sale.
- slantyyz 6y agoWell, I think the decision is a little more complicated. If you are upgrading, OS inertia may prevent you from choosing a machine that doesn't run the OS you're currently on. So a lot of Windows users may not even consider a Mac, and vice versa.
- gumby 6y agoYou sure can still buy the old ones. I suspect you will be able to for another year or so. See comment from me elsewhere on this thread for my reasoning.
- timothyduong 6y agoThere's a Macbook Pro 16" that you cannot get with a M1 Processor. That's the one I have. So yes, you can compare to the current gen and would be choosing between that.
- rbanffy 6y agoIt'd look less bad for AMD, but still wouldn't look brilliant. aarch64 allows some tricks that are much harder to pull off on amd64.
- sudosysgen 6y agoAMD still generally outpertforms Apple Silicon despite larger lithographies, so I don't really see it.
- GeekyBear 6y agoAMD Zen 3 outperforms on workloads that can take advantage of having more cores, but for single threaded workloads, it leads in some SPEC subtests and falls behind in others. https://www.anandtech.com/show/16252/mac-mini-apple-m1-tested/4 https://www.anandtech.com/show/16252/mac-mini-apple-m1-teste...
- rbanffy 6y ago> AMD still generally outperforms Apple Silicon despite larger lithographies The single-core benchmarks I saw put the M1 against CPUs with amd64 cores running SMT (which is fair - SMT extracts about 20% of extra parallelism of an amd64 workload, something the M1 does using a humongous reorder buffer on a single thread) with the AMD (and latest Intel) parts showing a slight advantage. They do so, however, at a much higher TDP which, if my own computers (all but the server under the desk) are any indication, will cause the x86's to throttle down in a couple seconds while the M1 will continue at full steam.
- sudosysgen 6y agoThey have a much higher TDP because you are comparing PC parts that are not optimized for power consumption. Their uncore is made using power-inefficient lithographies to save on cost and contribute a ton to power usage. They also have a lot more cores. Per high-performance core, M1 macs are tied or less efficient depending on the workload.
- 6y ago
- graindcafe 6y agoThere is no Macbook with AMD processor, I think that's why it is compared to Intel, that plus Intel being the historic leader
- izacus 6y agoThere's plenty of non-Macbooks with AMD processors which are competitive to it. Comparing to Intel is like comparing to PPC MacBooks - meaningless.
- slantyyz 6y agoAt this point, isn't comparing it to any non-Mac meaningless? The only way to get an M1 is to buy a Mac anyways. Unless/until you see a mass exodus of people from x86 based OSes the comparisons don't matter. Sure, new Macs will be super fast, and that in itself will result in some conversions, but there are plenty of other factors that would keep people from switching to Mac.
- mvanbaak 6y agoAt the moment you can buy intel and apple macbooks. They run the same system etc so that's how you can compare the two machines.
- sudosysgen 6y agoThere is no Macbook with AMD processor because Apple didn't want to make it. Intel is not the leader for 5+ years now.
- tengbretson 6y agoLet's not get ahead of ourselves. In the notebook space they've been the industry leader for less than 12 months.
- sudosysgen 6y agoThis is not the case. The very first Zen laptop parts were far ahead of Intel.