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I doubt Samsung is gonna come even close to Apple in performance. But perhaps getting decent ARM processors in laptops will mean we get battery life that is act

I doubt Samsung is gonna come even close to Apple in performance. But perhaps getting decent ARM processors in laptops will mean we get battery life that is actually good. It's hard to believe that you can use a mobile phone with a high resolution screen and get 8 hours SOT with a varied workload. But browse the web in Chrome on a 2020 Intel or AMD based Windows laptop with a 1080p screen and see that your battery life doesn't even come close. Despite a much larger battery.

drcode 5y ago
It seems to me M1-style performance should be easy to achieve for other large companies with access to decent foundries... one would think Samsung could just use a similar ARM core, then study the design of the M1 to come up with a competitive cache design. (but I'm no expert, happy to have someone correct my view with better information)
- read_if_gay_ 5y ago
  If that were the case Apple couldn’t have maintained a huge performance lead in smartphone CPUs for half a decade.
  - systemvoltage 5y ago
    Excellent point. Also Apple has a unique advantage of hardware + OS all built under their control and carefully optimized. Regular chip companies can't influence their customers as well as Apple's hardware team influences the OS departments.
  - marticode 5y ago
    They had a lead because they were optimizing for a different target than Qualcomm. Apple was more concerned about single core performance while Qualcomm was focusing on lower cost and efficiency.
- valuearb 5y ago
  If it was that easy Exynos wouldn’t already lag the A14 so badly. It should gain maybe 15% in a smaller process, but has a lot farther to go.
  - ascar 5y ago
    I was curious about the actual performance difference and I don't know what the big name benchmarks are, but a quick Google search showed the centurion benchmark [1] which puts the A14 just 5% ahead of the newest Exynos and Snapdragons. That's not too big of a lead? Last years benchmark against the A13 showed a much bigger gap tho. [1] https://www.techcenturion.com/smartphone-processors-ranking https://www.techcenturion.com/smartphone-processors-ranking
    - GeekyBear 5y ago
      The industry standard benchmark for completely different CPUs has been SPEC, going back to the days when every UNIX workstation vendor also had it's own custom CPU and instruction set. Exynos and Snapdragons aren't even close. https://www.anandtech.com/show/16252/mac-mini-apple-m1-tested/4 https://www.anandtech.com/show/16252/mac-mini-apple-m1-teste...
      - jeswin 5y ago
        The benchmark uses Snapdragon 865, not the newer generation. The Snapdragons also run at mobile phone power budgets.
        wmf 5y ago
        Fine, here you go: https://www.anandtech.com/show/16463/snapdragon-888-vs-exynos-2100-galaxy-s21-ultra/4 https://www.anandtech.com/show/16463/snapdragon-888-vs-exyno...
        jeswin 5y ago
        That's single threaded performance though. Snapdragons have more cores at the expense of single core performance.
- wmf 5y ago
  1. There was no similar ARM core until recently. 2. Samsung/Qualcomm/etc have lower prices and lower margins than Apple so they can't afford to make chips that are as big as Apple Silicon. For example, the M1 has four big cores but competitors use one big core and three medium.
  - fomine3 5y ago
    2. To be fair, A14 is just 2 big cores compared to other smartphone SoCs' 4(3+1) big cores. (but Apple's core design is richer than others)
LeoPanthera 5y ago
Is this a problem with processors, or with Chrome? Even on Intel MacBooks, battery life while using Safari is far better than while using Chrome.
- Philip-J-Fry 5y ago
  I think it's probably more Chrome's fault as Safari is known to be more optimised for battery. Likewise old Edge was pretty good for battery too. I know that if I use the native Windows Store based Netflix app on my laptop (Ryzen 4800u) I get much much longer battery life than if I use Netflix through Chrome. But it's still a long way off what you'd expect from a device with a battery so large compared to a phone. I think the M1 Mac vs Intel Mac battery life comparisons showcase the difference in CPU efficiency the best.
  - ascagnel_ 5y ago
    In my experience, Safari (and old Edge) were more willing to let pages crash or limit CPU cycles for the sake of system performance, while Chrome is content to let pages allocate as much RAM and use up as many CPU cycles as they want, letting poorly behaved websites work while sacrificing the rest of the system and battery life.
  - Sebb767 5y ago
    > I know that if I use the native Windows Store based Netflix app on my laptop (Ryzen 4800u) I get much much longer battery life than if I use Netflix through Chrome. The native app uses hardware decoding, while the browser one falls back to software decoding, so this is not surprising
- pedalpete 5y ago
  It's processors. x86 architecture is not as efficient as ARM based, which is why ARM is used in embedded low power devices. Like the common adoption curve, Intel viewed ARM as a toy, that could never compete with their power capabilities. But ARM got better and better every year, and though x86 got marginally better, they weren't being driven by a market that demanded higher performance. ARM caught up, and due to some exceptionally clever engineering by Apple, has surpassed the capabilities of x86. We've seen the same story many times before, electric cars will never be competitive, online shopping will never compete with the in store experience, solar/wind/etc will never compete with coal, digital cameras will never compete with film....etc etc Add your own, there are plenty of examples, but I'm failing to remember others right now.
GeekyBear 5y ago
Samsung's custom cores haven't been competitive with Qualcomm so far, much less Apple. You only have to look at comparisons between the Surface Pro X and the M1 Macbook Air to see how far behind Qualcomm is. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OhESSZIXvCA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OhESSZIXvCA
- judge2020 5y ago
  Differences between them start at 4:20 https://youtu.be/OhESSZIXvCA?t=261 https://youtu.be/OhESSZIXvCA?t=261
- trynumber9 5y ago
  They're not using their custom cores anymore. See the ARM X1/A78/A55 arrangement used in the Exynos 2100. They licensed AMD graphics IP to use that as a differentiating feature.
  - dannyw 5y ago
    They still use substantially less cache than Qualcomm.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - scoopertrooper 5y ago
      Maybe so, but in cache is one part of the overall story. If you look at benchmarks run on phones with both types of processor, Qualcomm is ahead, but the 2100 is nipping at their heels.
- nxc18 5y ago
  Even more damming, the future Surface pro X, with updated Qualcomm chip, will still be slower than windows in a VM on M1 Mac. https://www.windowscentral.com/leaked-snapdragon-processor-could-bring-big-boost-surface-pro-x https://www.windowscentral.com/leaked-snapdragon-processor-c...
- 5y ago
Zevis 5y ago
I'm confused. I easily get 8-10 hours on my Core i7 laptop as long as I'm not at 100% CPU usage permanently. Modern Ryzens also hit this easily. So I don't know why 8 hours screen on time on a tiny screen with an incomparably weak CPU is supposed to be proof of how much we need ARM. Apple's M1 is in a class of its own, unfortunately.
- PragmaticPulp 5y ago
  I’m also frequently confused when people refer to Windows laptops as in a different league of battery life. Modern Windows laptops do just fine. M1 is a cycle ahead, but the Ryzen mobile parts are actually very good too.
  - Roritharr 5y ago
    I suspect it has todo with getting decked out machines. If you've got the >1tb ssd and the >=32GB RAM model, you will see your OS simply use the ressources for caching and speeding up the machine, which in turn will use more battery. At least that's my pet theory, running an 4750U with 64GB of RAM installed ;)
    - saltcured 5y ago
      The RAM probably uses more power just by having more installed, but it shouldn't be causing more expensive work. If anything, being able to use RAM cached content should allow the SSD and its IO channels to idle more often. A "decked out" laptop might also have a more powerful GPU with nowhere near as good idle power characteristics. But, the largest differences are probably in idle power management, with the phone having much lower power IO channels and better zoned power management to really reduce idle power. A laptop often has the system in a much higher power level with off-chip resources powered up, including WiFi, screen refresh, data buses, and backlight driving a much larger screen area. Edit to add: I've noticed on laptops with Linux that vastly different battery life from "similar" machines come from differences in how the software and firmware interact to reach different powersaving modes for screen on but idle states, such as with a browser open on a page that has already rendered and awaits user input.
mdasen 5y ago
It's very unlikely given the difference in mobile performance, but it might mean that Samsung is going to seriously invest in ARM performance going forward. The latest Samsung mobile processor (Exynos 2100) hits 956 single-core and 3,151 multi-core for Geekbench. That's basically the same as the Qualcomm Snapdragon processors or maybe a bit slower. Apple's A14 hits 1,585 single-core and 4,214 multi-core (66% and 34% faster respectively). I would note that the Exynos still has good numbers. A 2020 MacBook Pro with i5-1038NG7 pulling 28W (not the cheaper 15W MacBook Pros) only hits 1,143 single-core and 4,227 multi-core. While the Exynos doesn't quite match an $1,800 laptop pulling 28W on single-core performance, the Intel is only 20% faster. Plus, on multi-core performance it is matching. If Samsung created a 10W or 15W part, it seems likely that they could beat that Intel processor. And one can nitpick about Intel having released an 11th gen processor or looking at AMD performance or any number of things. However, it seems reasonable to believe that Samsung is definitely within striking distance of Intel's laptop performance without too much difficulty and certainly within what people want in terms of laptop performance. If there were no worries about emulation of x86 instructions (since a lot of Windows software may never be ported to ARM), I think Samsung could easily satisfy people's performance needs. Ultimately, Apple isn't really a competitor if they're not going to sell their M-series chips to Windows laptop makers. Maybe people will start buying Macs based on their performance, but generally people have bought Macs because they want the Apple hardware/software, not because they could get better performance (and even stuck with Apple when they would have to suffer through miserable performance circa 2004). Samsung doesn't need to match Apple. They need to match Intel and it looks like they're there. If they can offer something at a lower cost with better thermal properties, that's a huge win. I think the bigger issue is going to be that so much Windows software won't get ported over. On the Mac side, everyone knows that they have to port everything over. On the Windows side, I'm guessing there are a lot of developers that doubt everyone's commitment to Windows-ARM. Plus, part of the Windows ecosystem is being able to run all sorts of stuff - something Mac users don't expect.
- fpoling 5y ago
  M1 and Rosetta shows that it is possible to emulate x86 and still run that faster than Intel for some workloads. Nothing prevents Samsung and Microsoft from doing that with Windows on Arm. And they do not need to match Apple efficiency, stuff like CPU 50% slowdown should be OK for most business and education oriented software as long as for native applications the performance will match roughly the latest Intel CPU.
vondur 5y ago
I'm guessing a lot of that has to do with software that gets preinstalled on Windows machines. There was a article the other day about how bad it is releasing laptop in 2021 with only 8GB of RAM. I noticed people in that thread talking about how their laptops after startup are using 6-7GB of RAM , which means they must have a lot of processes going on in the background. I'd imagine cutting down all of the unnecessary background processes would really help with battery life on laptops.
- tomComb 5y ago
  Supporting that theory, I find that Chromebooks can get by with less RAM than their Windows equivalent (even when the Windows machine will only be used for the web, which is pretty common these days in my experience).
- devwastaken 5y ago
  8GB is fine, the problem is all laptops are still shipped with 5400RPM harddrives. My mother bought a new $700 Inspiron from Dell, it's made of janky plastic and took 5 minutes to get to desktop and longer to do anything else. Replaced the 5400rpm drive with an SSD and it was plenty fast. Oems are sabotaging themselves to get their customers to buy their $1200 laptops - which at that point people are instead buying macbooks.
  - lotsofpulp 5y ago
    As long as you’re ok with macOS, there simply is no competitor to MacBook Air for the needs for 90% of people, and there hasn’t been for nearly a decade in my opinion. It’s cheap, lightweight, fast, long battery life, and has a tried and true design since many years.
    - devwastaken 5y ago
      Older people need 17" screens.
      - CameronNemo 5y ago
netdur 5y ago
Ok my take, it's not the processor, it's the software, iOS gone extra mile making ARM works good, that includes weird tricks with objective-c ... Samsung do not have that! they have Android, it is shit on both performance and batter, so making something for fuchsia?
- ClumsyPilot 5y ago
  I am not seeing significantly better battery life from my friend's iPhone
- saagarjha 5y ago
  This is not true. Apple of course does optimize their software for ARM, and there are a handful of "magic tricks" in the processor for some workloads. But in general the processor is just really, really fast.
xx789 5y ago
Performance isnt that important for most people. A 6 year old laptop is plenty fast enough, just weight and battery life suck.
phendrenad2 5y ago
> I doubt Samsung is gonna come even close to Apple in performance Why not?
- mrweasel 5y ago
  They’re not in control of the operating system. I have no doubt that Samsung can create a chip that’s every bit a good as the M1. I just think they’ll struggle to get the same level of performance from Windows as Apple can by controlling both CPU and OS.
Shorel 5y ago
I doubt it matters to Samsung. They are not Google, or an American company for that matter, where the mentality is win at first try or die. They will try to erode the market slowly but with constant grow, learning from other companies mistakes and having better fabs and better logistics.
- nrp 5y ago
  That is Samsung's MO, but it hasn't worked especially well with Exynos in the past. Part of it is that Samsung SLSI doesn't have the kind of support structure that Intel, AMD, Qualcomm, Mediatek, or even RockChip have to enable customer designs. The bigger issue though is that just about every OEM has been burned at some point by relying too much on Samsung. You can work around that with memory and to some extent displays, but taking that risk on a CPU is rough.
0x000000E2 5y ago
Newest gen Ryzen laptops are different. They're significantly more energy efficient than older AMD and any Intels. The energy efficiency of new AMD processors is something like 50% higher than Intel. Couple other things working against laptops. The screens are big and usually not OLED. They use forced cooling. And on cheap laptops the batteries are real tiny. As little as 40 watt hours, around 2.5X the size of phone battery. Energy efficiency of new Ryzen is probably better than Android ARM CPUs, similar to IPhone or M1
- nsbk 5y ago
  Is energy efficiency actually similar to M1? I'm not aware of any Ryzen-based fanless laptops
  - 0x000000E2 5y ago
    I'm fairly sure it is. Apple does have more experience with fanless SoCs though
  - timuzhti 5y ago
    Lenovo IdeaPad 1 is the one that I could find, but at the $350 price point needless to say it is not a flagship product. Main issue right now is that the 6W SoCs are about a generation and half behind the regular notebook APUs (which are themselves 0.5 to 1 generation behind the latest Zen in desktop CPUs). Not getting the latest and greatest means that it's highly unlikely anyone would want to bother designing a top-of-the-line product around it.
hyperpallium2 5y ago
I think they'll catch up pretty quickly - there's a limit to architectural improvements Apple can make to stay ahead.
gumby 5y ago
TBF that mobile machine aggressively puts apps to sleep and has other techniques to avoid consuming power. A laptop doesn’t bother in the interest of a different experience.
- Philip-J-Fry 5y ago
  That begs the question though, why don't they? My phone is snappy and the user experience is amazing. It's rare that it's visible to the user that this is happening. If I minimize an application on my laptop then why shouldn't it just sleep?
  - gumby 5y ago
    First of all, because the UX is very single-activity oriented (the iPad has a limited amount of multitasking). "desktop/laptop" multi-window/multi-app WIMP interface requires lots of active processes. Apple did implement the capability to freeze apps and kill apps with no windows but there was a huge outcry and few apps advertise this ability to the OS.
KingOfCoders 5y ago
Laptops are overrated. I had MBPs for 15+ years. But I no longer got to conferences or take my laptop with me, my phone works for most things. Then I recognized that 99% of time I use my laptop on a table with an external monitor. Switched to an iMacPro which already was a much better experience. Now have a powerful desktop which is cheaper than an MBP but more powerful (main reason was ML training though, otherwise I would have stayed with the iMacPro).
- pulse7 5y ago
  They are not overrated. They allow you to move your office any time you want: you can work from office, work from home, work from a hotel, etc. Laptops are mobile workstations and with 2-in-1 they are also big tablets.
  - KingOfCoders 5y ago
    I no longer go to hotels. I do no longer work on holidays. I no longer work at home if I have an office, and I no longer work in an office if I do remote work.
    - pulse7 5y ago
      But I can take my laptop from my living room to another room if I need more peace and then bring it back to show something to my child and I can bring it anywhere I want without much hurdle... laptop is my mobile computer...
- KozmoNau7 5y ago
  I absolutely have to disagree with you on this. Laptops are certainly not overrated, and from my experience laptops have been the standard form factor for office work for over a decade, and longer in some sectors. People constantly on the go have been using them for even longer than that, and unless you have very specific workloads that have to run locally and cannot be pushed to a powerful server (CAD/CAM, 3D modeling, video editing), there are absolutely no drawbacks to using a laptop with a docking station, which lets you take your work with you meetings, presentations, conferences, anywhere a white collar worker needs to go. (Blue collar workers and others with a need to use a computer out in the "real world" have obviously always used portable machines, since the very earliest ones. Toughbooks exist for a reason.) It's just a lot more flexible and makes it easier to collaborate with others. Modern docks can run multiple 4K displays, so the need for dedicated desktop PCs has become smaller and smaller.
ekianjo 5y ago
Smaller screen equals smaller power consumption though. Phones keep shutting down apps and keep their screens off the whole time. No wonder you get longer usage.
newdude116 5y ago
"It's hard to believe that you can use a mobile phone with a high resolution screen and get 8 hours SOT with a varied workload." Dunno what SOT is but I dont think my >2y old Pixel won't last an our with browsing.

drcode 5y ago

It seems to me M1-style performance should be easy to achieve for other large companies with access to decent foundries... one would think Samsung could just use a similar ARM core, then study the design of the M1 to come up with a competitive cache design. (but I'm no expert, happy to have someone correct my view with better information)

read_if_gay_ 5y ago
If that were the case Apple couldn’t have maintained a huge performance lead in smartphone CPUs for half a decade.
- systemvoltage 5y ago
  Excellent point. Also Apple has a unique advantage of hardware + OS all built under their control and carefully optimized. Regular chip companies can't influence their customers as well as Apple's hardware team influences the OS departments.
- marticode 5y ago
  They had a lead because they were optimizing for a different target than Qualcomm. Apple was more concerned about single core performance while Qualcomm was focusing on lower cost and efficiency.
valuearb 5y ago
If it was that easy Exynos wouldn’t already lag the A14 so badly. It should gain maybe 15% in a smaller process, but has a lot farther to go.
- ascar 5y ago
  I was curious about the actual performance difference and I don't know what the big name benchmarks are, but a quick Google search showed the centurion benchmark [1] which puts the A14 just 5% ahead of the newest Exynos and Snapdragons. That's not too big of a lead? Last years benchmark against the A13 showed a much bigger gap tho. [1] https://www.techcenturion.com/smartphone-processors-ranking https://www.techcenturion.com/smartphone-processors-ranking
  - GeekyBear 5y ago
    The industry standard benchmark for completely different CPUs has been SPEC, going back to the days when every UNIX workstation vendor also had it's own custom CPU and instruction set. Exynos and Snapdragons aren't even close. https://www.anandtech.com/show/16252/mac-mini-apple-m1-tested/4 https://www.anandtech.com/show/16252/mac-mini-apple-m1-teste...
    - jeswin 5y ago
      The benchmark uses Snapdragon 865, not the newer generation. The Snapdragons also run at mobile phone power budgets.
      - wmf 5y ago
        Fine, here you go: https://www.anandtech.com/show/16463/snapdragon-888-vs-exynos-2100-galaxy-s21-ultra/4 https://www.anandtech.com/show/16463/snapdragon-888-vs-exyno...
        jeswin 5y ago
        That's single threaded performance though. Snapdragons have more cores at the expense of single core performance.
wmf 5y ago
1. There was no similar ARM core until recently. 2. Samsung/Qualcomm/etc have lower prices and lower margins than Apple so they can't afford to make chips that are as big as Apple Silicon. For example, the M1 has four big cores but competitors use one big core and three medium.
- fomine3 5y ago
  2. To be fair, A14 is just 2 big cores compared to other smartphone SoCs' 4(3+1) big cores. (but Apple's core design is richer than others)

LeoPanthera 5y ago

Is this a problem with processors, or with Chrome? Even on Intel MacBooks, battery life while using Safari is far better than while using Chrome.

Philip-J-Fry 5y ago
I think it's probably more Chrome's fault as Safari is known to be more optimised for battery. Likewise old Edge was pretty good for battery too. I know that if I use the native Windows Store based Netflix app on my laptop (Ryzen 4800u) I get much much longer battery life than if I use Netflix through Chrome. But it's still a long way off what you'd expect from a device with a battery so large compared to a phone. I think the M1 Mac vs Intel Mac battery life comparisons showcase the difference in CPU efficiency the best.
- ascagnel_ 5y ago
  In my experience, Safari (and old Edge) were more willing to let pages crash or limit CPU cycles for the sake of system performance, while Chrome is content to let pages allocate as much RAM and use up as many CPU cycles as they want, letting poorly behaved websites work while sacrificing the rest of the system and battery life.
- Sebb767 5y ago
  > I know that if I use the native Windows Store based Netflix app on my laptop (Ryzen 4800u) I get much much longer battery life than if I use Netflix through Chrome. The native app uses hardware decoding, while the browser one falls back to software decoding, so this is not surprising
pedalpete 5y ago
It's processors. x86 architecture is not as efficient as ARM based, which is why ARM is used in embedded low power devices. Like the common adoption curve, Intel viewed ARM as a toy, that could never compete with their power capabilities. But ARM got better and better every year, and though x86 got marginally better, they weren't being driven by a market that demanded higher performance. ARM caught up, and due to some exceptionally clever engineering by Apple, has surpassed the capabilities of x86. We've seen the same story many times before, electric cars will never be competitive, online shopping will never compete with the in store experience, solar/wind/etc will never compete with coal, digital cameras will never compete with film....etc etc Add your own, there are plenty of examples, but I'm failing to remember others right now.

GeekyBear 5y ago

Samsung's custom cores haven't been competitive with Qualcomm so far, much less Apple. You only have to look at comparisons between the Surface Pro X and the M1 Macbook Air to see how far behind Qualcomm is. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OhESSZIXvCA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OhESSZIXvCA

judge2020 5y ago
Differences between them start at 4:20 https://youtu.be/OhESSZIXvCA?t=261 https://youtu.be/OhESSZIXvCA?t=261
trynumber9 5y ago
They're not using their custom cores anymore. See the ARM X1/A78/A55 arrangement used in the Exynos 2100. They licensed AMD graphics IP to use that as a differentiating feature.
- dannyw 5y ago
  They still use substantially less cache than Qualcomm.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - scoopertrooper 5y ago
    Maybe so, but in cache is one part of the overall story. If you look at benchmarks run on phones with both types of processor, Qualcomm is ahead, but the 2100 is nipping at their heels.
nxc18 5y ago
Even more damming, the future Surface pro X, with updated Qualcomm chip, will still be slower than windows in a VM on M1 Mac. https://www.windowscentral.com/leaked-snapdragon-processor-could-bring-big-boost-surface-pro-x https://www.windowscentral.com/leaked-snapdragon-processor-c...
5y ago

Zevis 5y ago

I'm confused. I easily get 8-10 hours on my Core i7 laptop as long as I'm not at 100% CPU usage permanently. Modern Ryzens also hit this easily. So I don't know why 8 hours screen on time on a tiny screen with an incomparably weak CPU is supposed to be proof of how much we need ARM. Apple's M1 is in a class of its own, unfortunately.

PragmaticPulp 5y ago
I’m also frequently confused when people refer to Windows laptops as in a different league of battery life. Modern Windows laptops do just fine. M1 is a cycle ahead, but the Ryzen mobile parts are actually very good too.
- Roritharr 5y ago
  I suspect it has todo with getting decked out machines. If you've got the >1tb ssd and the >=32GB RAM model, you will see your OS simply use the ressources for caching and speeding up the machine, which in turn will use more battery. At least that's my pet theory, running an 4750U with 64GB of RAM installed ;)
  - saltcured 5y ago
    The RAM probably uses more power just by having more installed, but it shouldn't be causing more expensive work. If anything, being able to use RAM cached content should allow the SSD and its IO channels to idle more often. A "decked out" laptop might also have a more powerful GPU with nowhere near as good idle power characteristics. But, the largest differences are probably in idle power management, with the phone having much lower power IO channels and better zoned power management to really reduce idle power. A laptop often has the system in a much higher power level with off-chip resources powered up, including WiFi, screen refresh, data buses, and backlight driving a much larger screen area. Edit to add: I've noticed on laptops with Linux that vastly different battery life from "similar" machines come from differences in how the software and firmware interact to reach different powersaving modes for screen on but idle states, such as with a browser open on a page that has already rendered and awaits user input.

mdasen 5y ago

It's very unlikely given the difference in mobile performance, but it might mean that Samsung is going to seriously invest in ARM performance going forward. The latest Samsung mobile processor (Exynos 2100) hits 956 single-core and 3,151 multi-core for Geekbench. That's basically the same as the Qualcomm Snapdragon processors or maybe a bit slower. Apple's A14 hits 1,585 single-core and 4,214 multi-core (66% and 34% faster respectively). I would note that the Exynos still has good numbers. A 2020 MacBook Pro with i5-1038NG7 pulling 28W (not the cheaper 15W MacBook Pros) only hits 1,143 single-core and 4,227 multi-core. While the Exynos doesn't quite match an $1,800 laptop pulling 28W on single-core performance, the Intel is only 20% faster. Plus, on multi-core performance it is matching. If Samsung created a 10W or 15W part, it seems likely that they could beat that Intel processor. And one can nitpick about Intel having released an 11th gen processor or looking at AMD performance or any number of things. However, it seems reasonable to believe that Samsung is definitely within striking distance of Intel's laptop performance without too much difficulty and certainly within what people want in terms of laptop performance. If there were no worries about emulation of x86 instructions (since a lot of Windows software may never be ported to ARM), I think Samsung could easily satisfy people's performance needs. Ultimately, Apple isn't really a competitor if they're not going to sell their M-series chips to Windows laptop makers. Maybe people will start buying Macs based on their performance, but generally people have bought Macs because they want the Apple hardware/software, not because they could get better performance (and even stuck with Apple when they would have to suffer through miserable performance circa 2004). Samsung doesn't need to match Apple. They need to match Intel and it looks like they're there. If they can offer something at a lower cost with better thermal properties, that's a huge win. I think the bigger issue is going to be that so much Windows software won't get ported over. On the Mac side, everyone knows that they have to port everything over. On the Windows side, I'm guessing there are a lot of developers that doubt everyone's commitment to Windows-ARM. Plus, part of the Windows ecosystem is being able to run all sorts of stuff - something Mac users don't expect.

fpoling 5y ago
M1 and Rosetta shows that it is possible to emulate x86 and still run that faster than Intel for some workloads. Nothing prevents Samsung and Microsoft from doing that with Windows on Arm. And they do not need to match Apple efficiency, stuff like CPU 50% slowdown should be OK for most business and education oriented software as long as for native applications the performance will match roughly the latest Intel CPU.

vondur 5y ago

I'm guessing a lot of that has to do with software that gets preinstalled on Windows machines. There was a article the other day about how bad it is releasing laptop in 2021 with only 8GB of RAM. I noticed people in that thread talking about how their laptops after startup are using 6-7GB of RAM , which means they must have a lot of processes going on in the background. I'd imagine cutting down all of the unnecessary background processes would really help with battery life on laptops.

tomComb 5y ago
Supporting that theory, I find that Chromebooks can get by with less RAM than their Windows equivalent (even when the Windows machine will only be used for the web, which is pretty common these days in my experience).
devwastaken 5y ago
8GB is fine, the problem is all laptops are still shipped with 5400RPM harddrives. My mother bought a new $700 Inspiron from Dell, it's made of janky plastic and took 5 minutes to get to desktop and longer to do anything else. Replaced the 5400rpm drive with an SSD and it was plenty fast. Oems are sabotaging themselves to get their customers to buy their $1200 laptops - which at that point people are instead buying macbooks.
- lotsofpulp 5y ago
  As long as you’re ok with macOS, there simply is no competitor to MacBook Air for the needs for 90% of people, and there hasn’t been for nearly a decade in my opinion. It’s cheap, lightweight, fast, long battery life, and has a tried and true design since many years.
  - devwastaken 5y ago
    Older people need 17" screens.
    - CameronNemo 5y ago

netdur 5y ago

Ok my take, it's not the processor, it's the software, iOS gone extra mile making ARM works good, that includes weird tricks with objective-c ... Samsung do not have that! they have Android, it is shit on both performance and batter, so making something for fuchsia?

ClumsyPilot 5y ago
I am not seeing significantly better battery life from my friend's iPhone
saagarjha 5y ago
This is not true. Apple of course does optimize their software for ARM, and there are a handful of "magic tricks" in the processor for some workloads. But in general the processor is just really, really fast.

xx789 5y ago

Performance isnt that important for most people. A 6 year old laptop is plenty fast enough, just weight and battery life suck.

phendrenad2 5y ago

> I doubt Samsung is gonna come even close to Apple in performance Why not?

mrweasel 5y ago
They’re not in control of the operating system. I have no doubt that Samsung can create a chip that’s every bit a good as the M1. I just think they’ll struggle to get the same level of performance from Windows as Apple can by controlling both CPU and OS.

Shorel 5y ago

I doubt it matters to Samsung. They are not Google, or an American company for that matter, where the mentality is win at first try or die. They will try to erode the market slowly but with constant grow, learning from other companies mistakes and having better fabs and better logistics.

nrp 5y ago
That is Samsung's MO, but it hasn't worked especially well with Exynos in the past. Part of it is that Samsung SLSI doesn't have the kind of support structure that Intel, AMD, Qualcomm, Mediatek, or even RockChip have to enable customer designs. The bigger issue though is that just about every OEM has been burned at some point by relying too much on Samsung. You can work around that with memory and to some extent displays, but taking that risk on a CPU is rough.

0x000000E2 5y ago

Newest gen Ryzen laptops are different. They're significantly more energy efficient than older AMD and any Intels. The energy efficiency of new AMD processors is something like 50% higher than Intel. Couple other things working against laptops. The screens are big and usually not OLED. They use forced cooling. And on cheap laptops the batteries are real tiny. As little as 40 watt hours, around 2.5X the size of phone battery. Energy efficiency of new Ryzen is probably better than Android ARM CPUs, similar to IPhone or M1

nsbk 5y ago
Is energy efficiency actually similar to M1? I'm not aware of any Ryzen-based fanless laptops
- 0x000000E2 5y ago
  I'm fairly sure it is. Apple does have more experience with fanless SoCs though
- timuzhti 5y ago
  Lenovo IdeaPad 1 is the one that I could find, but at the $350 price point needless to say it is not a flagship product. Main issue right now is that the 6W SoCs are about a generation and half behind the regular notebook APUs (which are themselves 0.5 to 1 generation behind the latest Zen in desktop CPUs). Not getting the latest and greatest means that it's highly unlikely anyone would want to bother designing a top-of-the-line product around it.

hyperpallium2 5y ago

I think they'll catch up pretty quickly - there's a limit to architectural improvements Apple can make to stay ahead.

gumby 5y ago

TBF that mobile machine aggressively puts apps to sleep and has other techniques to avoid consuming power. A laptop doesn’t bother in the interest of a different experience.

Philip-J-Fry 5y ago
That begs the question though, why don't they? My phone is snappy and the user experience is amazing. It's rare that it's visible to the user that this is happening. If I minimize an application on my laptop then why shouldn't it just sleep?
- gumby 5y ago
  First of all, because the UX is very single-activity oriented (the iPad has a limited amount of multitasking). "desktop/laptop" multi-window/multi-app WIMP interface requires lots of active processes. Apple did implement the capability to freeze apps and kill apps with no windows but there was a huge outcry and few apps advertise this ability to the OS.

KingOfCoders 5y ago

Laptops are overrated. I had MBPs for 15+ years. But I no longer got to conferences or take my laptop with me, my phone works for most things. Then I recognized that 99% of time I use my laptop on a table with an external monitor. Switched to an iMacPro which already was a much better experience. Now have a powerful desktop which is cheaper than an MBP but more powerful (main reason was ML training though, otherwise I would have stayed with the iMacPro).

pulse7 5y ago
They are not overrated. They allow you to move your office any time you want: you can work from office, work from home, work from a hotel, etc. Laptops are mobile workstations and with 2-in-1 they are also big tablets.
- KingOfCoders 5y ago
  I no longer go to hotels. I do no longer work on holidays. I no longer work at home if I have an office, and I no longer work in an office if I do remote work.
  - pulse7 5y ago
    But I can take my laptop from my living room to another room if I need more peace and then bring it back to show something to my child and I can bring it anywhere I want without much hurdle... laptop is my mobile computer...
KozmoNau7 5y ago
I absolutely have to disagree with you on this. Laptops are certainly not overrated, and from my experience laptops have been the standard form factor for office work for over a decade, and longer in some sectors. People constantly on the go have been using them for even longer than that, and unless you have very specific workloads that have to run locally and cannot be pushed to a powerful server (CAD/CAM, 3D modeling, video editing), there are absolutely no drawbacks to using a laptop with a docking station, which lets you take your work with you meetings, presentations, conferences, anywhere a white collar worker needs to go. (Blue collar workers and others with a need to use a computer out in the "real world" have obviously always used portable machines, since the very earliest ones. Toughbooks exist for a reason.) It's just a lot more flexible and makes it easier to collaborate with others. Modern docks can run multiple 4K displays, so the need for dedicated desktop PCs has become smaller and smaller.

ekianjo 5y ago

Smaller screen equals smaller power consumption though. Phones keep shutting down apps and keep their screens off the whole time. No wonder you get longer usage.

newdude116 5y ago

"It's hard to believe that you can use a mobile phone with a high resolution screen and get 8 hours SOT with a varied workload." Dunno what SOT is but I dont think my >2y old Pixel won't last an our with browsing.