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The obvious answer is that performance/watt is literally everything when talking about laptops. Most people favor laptops these days even if they (like me) leav

The obvious answer is that performance/watt is literally everything when talking about laptops. Most people favor laptops these days even if they (like me) leave their machines "docked" 90% of the time. do we know for a fact that a 90w Apple GPU would perform 4x faster if it was running at 500w It's somewhat besides the point IMO, but don't GPU workloads tend to scale well simply by adding more compute units? This should be pretty easy to extrapolate by comparing M1 / M1 Pro / M1 Max power consumption and performance relative to the # of GPU cores. I would certainly like to see Apple go nuts and make a true, cost-and-power-consumption-are-no-object world destroying GPU. If only as a halo product. But I wouldn't hold my breath.

dboat 5y ago
I think increasing cores/power limits just gets you up to some other bottleneck. At some point you are adding 90% more power use for 3% more performance.
jayd16 5y ago
Performance/watt it not everything. It's not really even something. It's a derivative concern. The only reason I care about performance/watt is because I actually care about noise, heat and battery life. I'm not running a data center off a laptop so the cost benefits of performance/watt are not even a concern. Its a nice chip but we shouldn't confuse the marketing for the actual benefits. If a higher performance/watt but much lower absolute performance chip was released, I wouldn't be interested.
- emodendroket 5y ago
  > The only reason I care about performance/watt is because I actually care about noise, heat and battery life. Yeah, all pretty major concerns?
  - jayd16 5y ago
    The point is at best I care about perf/watt indirectly and the things I do care about can be improved in other ways so its incorrect to say perf/watt is everything. I admit it's a pedantic comment but I was pulled in by use of "literally everything".
    - emodendroket 5y ago
      The other ways to mitigate those things have pretty significant downsides. For instance, maybe you can stick a bigger battery in there to improve battery life, sure. But now it's heavier and more expensive.
    - JohnBooty 5y ago
      The point is at best I care about perf/watt indirectly and the things I do care about can be improved in other ways Not necessarily, at least not for single core performance. Even if you're willing to accept unbounded power consumption and waste heat, the die size of the CPU itself won't be increasing at the same rate. You fairly quickly learn that dissipating kilowatts of watts of heat from something as tiny as a CPU die (or, more accurately, one particular subset of functional units from in a CPU core) is awfully difficult. At some point, the CPU/GPU/etc need to be kept under a certain temp, which sets an upper bound on watts. So, no escaping watts/performance....
    - rsynnott 5y ago
      > and the things I do care about can be improved in other ways so its incorrect to say perf/watt is everything. Okay, noise, _maybe_, but how are you proposing to improve heat and battery life without improving perf/watt? Your options for battery life are either to reduce performance, or to increase battery size (but, well, good luck with that; the 16" MBP is already as big as a laptop battery can practically be, as if it was any bigger you wouldn't be allowed take it on a plane). Your only option to reduce heat without improving perf/watt would be to reduce performance.
- JohnBooty 5y ago
  Performance/watt it not everything. It's not really even something. It's a derivative concern. The only reason I care about performance/watt is because I actually care about noise, heat and battery life. In 10 years this is one of the more confusing I've ever seen on HN. You care about noise, heat, and battery life but you don't care about performance/watt? Performance/watt is a "derivative" concern, but somehow those metrics aren't? Presumably, all you really care about is raw performance then? Well, OK, fair enough. We can all care about different things. But even though, performance/watt still rules: for all practical purposes the watts part constrains the performance part. For a given power supply and cooling system, you can only draw and dissipate X number of watts. So you are back to the question of how much performance the system can provide given X watts. Even no-compromises cooling solutions most would consider highly impractical (involving liquid nitrogen etc) run into this issue at some point. So yeah, you actually do care about performance/watt?

dboat 5y ago

I think increasing cores/power limits just gets you up to some other bottleneck. At some point you are adding 90% more power use for 3% more performance.

jayd16 5y ago

Performance/watt it not everything. It's not really even something. It's a derivative concern. The only reason I care about performance/watt is because I actually care about noise, heat and battery life. I'm not running a data center off a laptop so the cost benefits of performance/watt are not even a concern. Its a nice chip but we shouldn't confuse the marketing for the actual benefits. If a higher performance/watt but much lower absolute performance chip was released, I wouldn't be interested.

emodendroket 5y ago
> The only reason I care about performance/watt is because I actually care about noise, heat and battery life. Yeah, all pretty major concerns?
- jayd16 5y ago
  The point is at best I care about perf/watt indirectly and the things I do care about can be improved in other ways so its incorrect to say perf/watt is everything. I admit it's a pedantic comment but I was pulled in by use of "literally everything".
  - emodendroket 5y ago
    The other ways to mitigate those things have pretty significant downsides. For instance, maybe you can stick a bigger battery in there to improve battery life, sure. But now it's heavier and more expensive.
  - JohnBooty 5y ago
    The point is at best I care about perf/watt indirectly and the things I do care about can be improved in other ways Not necessarily, at least not for single core performance. Even if you're willing to accept unbounded power consumption and waste heat, the die size of the CPU itself won't be increasing at the same rate. You fairly quickly learn that dissipating kilowatts of watts of heat from something as tiny as a CPU die (or, more accurately, one particular subset of functional units from in a CPU core) is awfully difficult. At some point, the CPU/GPU/etc need to be kept under a certain temp, which sets an upper bound on watts. So, no escaping watts/performance....
  - rsynnott 5y ago
    > and the things I do care about can be improved in other ways so its incorrect to say perf/watt is everything. Okay, noise, _maybe_, but how are you proposing to improve heat and battery life without improving perf/watt? Your options for battery life are either to reduce performance, or to increase battery size (but, well, good luck with that; the 16" MBP is already as big as a laptop battery can practically be, as if it was any bigger you wouldn't be allowed take it on a plane). Your only option to reduce heat without improving perf/watt would be to reduce performance.
JohnBooty 5y ago
Performance/watt it not everything. It's not really even something. It's a derivative concern. The only reason I care about performance/watt is because I actually care about noise, heat and battery life. In 10 years this is one of the more confusing I've ever seen on HN. You care about noise, heat, and battery life but you don't care about performance/watt? Performance/watt is a "derivative" concern, but somehow those metrics aren't? Presumably, all you really care about is raw performance then? Well, OK, fair enough. We can all care about different things. But even though, performance/watt still rules: for all practical purposes the watts part constrains the performance part. For a given power supply and cooling system, you can only draw and dissipate X number of watts. So you are back to the question of how much performance the system can provide given X watts. Even no-compromises cooling solutions most would consider highly impractical (involving liquid nitrogen etc) run into this issue at some point. So yeah, you actually do care about performance/watt?