4 ms·

I see this comparison all the time in articles about Intel, but until I can build a desktop with M1 Pro/Max, they are meaningless.

ksec 5y ago
That is the difference between a consumer review and tech review. They may be meaningless to consumers, but they are meaningful for those of us only want to learn about tech. This it the same with Graviton 2 on Servers.
- dirkg 5y ago
  they are meaningless to oem's and manufacturers as well since they cant buy an M1 and build a system around it.
  - oneplane 5y ago
    Most reviews are meaningless as a whole in the global context; most people can't afford any of the high performance parts of the electricity to power them anyway, and those that can now have the problem of shortages making it hard to get the parts at all. The only thing all of us get out of this is: context matters.
    - oneplane 5y ago
      Bummer, I made a typo. > parts of the electricity -> parts OR the electricity Quite the distinction there. I was referring to reviews in the global context where there are plenty of places on earth where even getting power is hard and you might be constrained to limited wattage or battery backups that drain very fast on high performance parts. All to build up an extra example context where there is no 'absolute' truth to some reviews out there.
- PragmaticPulp 5y ago
  > They may be meaningless to consumers, but they are meaningful for those of us only want to learn about tech. It's actually misleading to compare apples and oranges like this. CPU power efficiency is very non-linear. For example (made up numbers for example), it might require double the power to go from 3GHz to 4GHz and another doubling of power to go from 4GHz to 5GHz. If you're designing a low-power laptop chip, you take advantage of this fact and operate it at the lower frequencies. You may be able to cut the power consumption by 1/4 and still get 60-70% of the performance. If you're building a desktop for enthusiasts who are buying big liquid coolers, you go the other direction and push the CPU to the limit. That's what Intel did here. This factors in at the design stage, too. It's not as simple as taking the same design and scaling it up or down. You need to target your timings around a range of clock speeds and voltages. Drawing comparisons isn't as simple as dividing Geekbench scores by power consumption because the underlying math is very non-linear.
  - fomine3 5y ago
    Thankfully now we can set arbitrary power limit to my own CPU. I'd like to see benchmarks setup with same power usage.
  - wmf 5y ago
    OTOH when Apple takes an M1 from a laptop and puts it in a desktop... the performance and power are exactly the same. So it probably is fair to compare M1 Pro vs. 12900K.
  - ksec 5y ago
    >It's actually misleading to compare apples and oranges like this. I never make the claim it scale linearly. And I have been very explicit in the node simply because I expect technical reader should know it doesn't scale linearly ( may be I should have wrote it down just in case ) and as I wrote in my another reply you cant even use the TSMC N5 and scale to 5+Ghz. It is not optimised nor tested for that clock speed. To make the comparison on a low power node, Alderlake using 5W at 3.2Ghz, and scale linearly with GB5 score, it would get a result of 1140. On the same power, M1 is able to score 50% higher. Or 50% increase in IPC. But that comparison in my view is unfair if not truly misleading. Because there are a lot of assumption involved, from scaling to design and performance characteristics. Where as the previous comparison was done with two actual product based on facts, and you should draw your own conclusion within the context.

ksec 5y ago

That is the difference between a consumer review and tech review. They may be meaningless to consumers, but they are meaningful for those of us only want to learn about tech. This it the same with Graviton 2 on Servers.

dirkg 5y ago
they are meaningless to oem's and manufacturers as well since they cant buy an M1 and build a system around it.
- oneplane 5y ago
  Most reviews are meaningless as a whole in the global context; most people can't afford any of the high performance parts of the electricity to power them anyway, and those that can now have the problem of shortages making it hard to get the parts at all. The only thing all of us get out of this is: context matters.
  - oneplane 5y ago
    Bummer, I made a typo. > parts of the electricity -> parts OR the electricity Quite the distinction there. I was referring to reviews in the global context where there are plenty of places on earth where even getting power is hard and you might be constrained to limited wattage or battery backups that drain very fast on high performance parts. All to build up an extra example context where there is no 'absolute' truth to some reviews out there.
PragmaticPulp 5y ago
> They may be meaningless to consumers, but they are meaningful for those of us only want to learn about tech. It's actually misleading to compare apples and oranges like this. CPU power efficiency is very non-linear. For example (made up numbers for example), it might require double the power to go from 3GHz to 4GHz and another doubling of power to go from 4GHz to 5GHz. If you're designing a low-power laptop chip, you take advantage of this fact and operate it at the lower frequencies. You may be able to cut the power consumption by 1/4 and still get 60-70% of the performance. If you're building a desktop for enthusiasts who are buying big liquid coolers, you go the other direction and push the CPU to the limit. That's what Intel did here. This factors in at the design stage, too. It's not as simple as taking the same design and scaling it up or down. You need to target your timings around a range of clock speeds and voltages. Drawing comparisons isn't as simple as dividing Geekbench scores by power consumption because the underlying math is very non-linear.
- fomine3 5y ago
  Thankfully now we can set arbitrary power limit to my own CPU. I'd like to see benchmarks setup with same power usage.
- wmf 5y ago
  OTOH when Apple takes an M1 from a laptop and puts it in a desktop... the performance and power are exactly the same. So it probably is fair to compare M1 Pro vs. 12900K.
- ksec 5y ago
  >It's actually misleading to compare apples and oranges like this. I never make the claim it scale linearly. And I have been very explicit in the node simply because I expect technical reader should know it doesn't scale linearly ( may be I should have wrote it down just in case ) and as I wrote in my another reply you cant even use the TSMC N5 and scale to 5+Ghz. It is not optimised nor tested for that clock speed. To make the comparison on a low power node, Alderlake using 5W at 3.2Ghz, and scale linearly with GB5 score, it would get a result of 1140. On the same power, M1 is able to score 50% higher. Or 50% increase in IPC. But that comparison in my view is unfair if not truly misleading. Because there are a lot of assumption involved, from scaling to design and performance characteristics. Where as the previous comparison was done with two actual product based on facts, and you should draw your own conclusion within the context.