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It would be an interesting comparison. Non-apple silicon has definitely not been great and lags behind significantly. Would be very interesting to see what Andr

It would be an interesting comparison. Non-apple silicon has definitely not been great and lags behind significantly. Would be very interesting to see what Android would be like on more modern CPU tech.

smoldesu 5y ago
Non-Apple has been perfectly fine. I mean, AMD was putting higher-performing APUs in laptops half the price of the M1 Macbook Air, and they did that 18 months before the M1 even hit the market. If you wanted an 8 core, 4ghz CPU with the GPU power of a 1050ti, the R74800u was prevalent in notebooks as cheap as $400, and was even lauded for a short period as one of the best budget gaming options on the laptop market. If you're exclusively referring to the handheld market though, then you're mostly right. Apple's big lead in this generation is mostly because of how fast they were able to buy out the world's 5nm node. The only real "Android" manufacturer doing the same thing is Samsung, which is only because they have the means to fab their own chips.
- lupire 5y ago
  Is that AMD example running at similar wattage?
  - smoldesu 5y ago
    It's pretty close. It's lowest TDP (before tinkering) rests at around 8-10w, and can get to 20-25w if you're running at full load (upper bounds normally come into play if the GPU is also running full blast. So no, it's the the same wattage, but it's similar enough to be a valid point of comparison, especially for a chip that appears in laptops half the price of the base Macbook Air. Plus, as time goes on, AMD seems to be getting better about power management. If you take a look at the latest reviews for the Surface Laptop 4 with Ryzen, many reviewers were surprised to find that it lasted nearly 17 hours of video playback.
- sod 5y ago
  Yes, it's a bummer that Apple has a deathgrip on 5nm and after that 3nm. Zen2 would be incredible on 5nm. IMHO the improvements we saw with geforce 30XX series and zen 2 were 80% the switch to 7nm tsmc. I'd fully expect another jump if nvidia and amd were able to get their hands on 5nm, but it's apple exclusive for now :(. Well, at least we get huge investments in chip manufacturing thanks to apple throwing money at tsmc.
- GeekyBear 5y ago
  > AMD was putting higher-performing APUs in laptops half the price of the M1 Macbook Air, and they did that 18 months before the M1 even hit the market APUs with Zen and Zen 2 cores were absolutely not outperforming the M1's Firestorm cores. >In SPECint2006, we’re now seeing the M1 close the gap to AMD’s Zen3, beating it in several workloads now, which increasing the gap to Intel’s new Tiger Lake design as well as their top-performing desktop CPU, which the M1 now beats in the majority of workloads. In the fp2006 workloads, we’re seeing the M1 post very large performance boosts relative to the A14, meaning that it now is able to claim the best performance out of all CPUs being compared here. https://www.anandtech.com/show/16252/mac-mini-apple-m1-tested/4 https://www.anandtech.com/show/16252/mac-mini-apple-m1-teste...
  - smoldesu 5y ago
    How does this surprise anyone at all? You're comparing a 5nm-based core to a 7nm-based core, of course there will be a direct disparity in performance. If anything, I'm surprised they weren't able to eke more performance out of it. The GPU is frankly pathetic, and the memory controller and IO subsystems are both obviously gimped too. As a matter of fact, the current M1 Mac Mini quite literally could not connect to all of my hardware with all the dongles in the world. There's just not enough bandwidth to run it all. Even if I splurged for the "Pro" device, it will still have the same bottlenecks as the consumer product. You can't spend a decade pretending that performance doesn't matter, only to rear your head again when Moore's law is sputtering out and gasping for air. Apple's power over the industry is unchecked right now, meaning they can play all sorts of petty tricks to gaslight mainstream manufacturers into a playing different game. ARM is the first step in that direction, and I for one couldn't be more happy with the hardware I own. Well, maybe if I sold my Macbook Air...
    - GeekyBear 5y ago
      > How does this surprise anyone at all? You're comparing a 5nm-based core to a 7nm-based core, of course there will be a direct disparity in performance Given that Apple took the power/heat drop with the transition from 7nm to 5nm instead of a performance increase, that's just not as relevant as it could have been if they had gone the other way. However, that M1 is still running with a significant frequency and power draw deficit vs the Ryzen as well. >During average single-threaded workloads on the 3.2GHz Firestorm cores, such as GCC code compilation, we’re seeing device power go up to 10.5W with active power at around 6.3W. https://www.anandtech.com/show/16252/mac-mini-apple-m1-tested https://www.anandtech.com/show/16252/mac-mini-apple-m1-teste... However, you compete with the performance you have today, not some theoretical performance you might have if your chip was made differently.

smoldesu 5y ago

Non-Apple has been perfectly fine. I mean, AMD was putting higher-performing APUs in laptops half the price of the M1 Macbook Air, and they did that 18 months before the M1 even hit the market. If you wanted an 8 core, 4ghz CPU with the GPU power of a 1050ti, the R74800u was prevalent in notebooks as cheap as $400, and was even lauded for a short period as one of the best budget gaming options on the laptop market. If you're exclusively referring to the handheld market though, then you're mostly right. Apple's big lead in this generation is mostly because of how fast they were able to buy out the world's 5nm node. The only real "Android" manufacturer doing the same thing is Samsung, which is only because they have the means to fab their own chips.

lupire 5y ago
Is that AMD example running at similar wattage?
- smoldesu 5y ago
  It's pretty close. It's lowest TDP (before tinkering) rests at around 8-10w, and can get to 20-25w if you're running at full load (upper bounds normally come into play if the GPU is also running full blast. So no, it's the the same wattage, but it's similar enough to be a valid point of comparison, especially for a chip that appears in laptops half the price of the base Macbook Air. Plus, as time goes on, AMD seems to be getting better about power management. If you take a look at the latest reviews for the Surface Laptop 4 with Ryzen, many reviewers were surprised to find that it lasted nearly 17 hours of video playback.
sod 5y ago
Yes, it's a bummer that Apple has a deathgrip on 5nm and after that 3nm. Zen2 would be incredible on 5nm. IMHO the improvements we saw with geforce 30XX series and zen 2 were 80% the switch to 7nm tsmc. I'd fully expect another jump if nvidia and amd were able to get their hands on 5nm, but it's apple exclusive for now :(. Well, at least we get huge investments in chip manufacturing thanks to apple throwing money at tsmc.
GeekyBear 5y ago
> AMD was putting higher-performing APUs in laptops half the price of the M1 Macbook Air, and they did that 18 months before the M1 even hit the market APUs with Zen and Zen 2 cores were absolutely not outperforming the M1's Firestorm cores. >In SPECint2006, we’re now seeing the M1 close the gap to AMD’s Zen3, beating it in several workloads now, which increasing the gap to Intel’s new Tiger Lake design as well as their top-performing desktop CPU, which the M1 now beats in the majority of workloads. In the fp2006 workloads, we’re seeing the M1 post very large performance boosts relative to the A14, meaning that it now is able to claim the best performance out of all CPUs being compared here. https://www.anandtech.com/show/16252/mac-mini-apple-m1-tested/4 https://www.anandtech.com/show/16252/mac-mini-apple-m1-teste...
- smoldesu 5y ago
  How does this surprise anyone at all? You're comparing a 5nm-based core to a 7nm-based core, of course there will be a direct disparity in performance. If anything, I'm surprised they weren't able to eke more performance out of it. The GPU is frankly pathetic, and the memory controller and IO subsystems are both obviously gimped too. As a matter of fact, the current M1 Mac Mini quite literally could not connect to all of my hardware with all the dongles in the world. There's just not enough bandwidth to run it all. Even if I splurged for the "Pro" device, it will still have the same bottlenecks as the consumer product. You can't spend a decade pretending that performance doesn't matter, only to rear your head again when Moore's law is sputtering out and gasping for air. Apple's power over the industry is unchecked right now, meaning they can play all sorts of petty tricks to gaslight mainstream manufacturers into a playing different game. ARM is the first step in that direction, and I for one couldn't be more happy with the hardware I own. Well, maybe if I sold my Macbook Air...
  - GeekyBear 5y ago
    > How does this surprise anyone at all? You're comparing a 5nm-based core to a 7nm-based core, of course there will be a direct disparity in performance Given that Apple took the power/heat drop with the transition from 7nm to 5nm instead of a performance increase, that's just not as relevant as it could have been if they had gone the other way. However, that M1 is still running with a significant frequency and power draw deficit vs the Ryzen as well. >During average single-threaded workloads on the 3.2GHz Firestorm cores, such as GCC code compilation, we’re seeing device power go up to 10.5W with active power at around 6.3W. https://www.anandtech.com/show/16252/mac-mini-apple-m1-tested https://www.anandtech.com/show/16252/mac-mini-apple-m1-teste... However, you compete with the performance you have today, not some theoretical performance you might have if your chip was made differently.