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What excites me about apple Silicon is this: performance that is roughly on par with competing x86 CPUs combined with ~5x lower power usage. My M1 MacBook Pro

by runeks 4y ago

What excites me about apple Silicon is this: performance that is roughly on par with competing x86 CPUs combined with ~5x lower power usage. My M1 MacBook Pro can run full throttle on all 8 "performance" CPU cores for an hour without the fans ever spinning up. This tells me that Apple could fit 32 performance cores in a laptop CPU, which is simply not possible with x86 (unless you severely compromise on the definition of "portable").

cyber_kinetist 4y ago
> This tells me that Apple could fit 32 performance cores in a laptop CPU I'm not too sure about that. The current 20-core CPU from Apple is inside the Mac Studio, and it has quite a monster of an air cooler. It's obviously going to be much harder to put that (or something more powerful) inside a laptop, even with all the chip improvements...
- zozbot234 4y ago
  Well of course it does, who wants to be thermally throttled on a desktop-class machine? You're assuming that desktop and laptop use must support the exact same scenarios which is not true among x86-64 users either.
- runeks 4y ago
  Interesting. Something’s not adding up here, though. 8 cores = “tiny fans basically always off” vs 20 cores = “two huge fans”. Either those two huge fans are running at a very low RPM, or the fans in the laptop are almost as efficient as the huge ones. I highly doubt the latter, so I assume the former is the case.
  - sharikous 4y ago
    Really? MBP 13: 4 performance cores + 4 efficiency cores Mac Studio: 16 performance cores + 4 efficiency cores Not to mention that the more cores you have, the bigger the overhead of e.g. synchronizing between them becomes
- rsynnott 4y ago
  The M1 Ultra in the Studio apparently peaks at about 60W, so a laptop based on it would have lower peak power usage than an old 15" MBP (45W CPU, 35W GPU, usually).
zozbot234 4y ago
This is not comparing like for like, as we have yet to see how x86 does on those device fabbing nodes. And other ARM vendors are not really in the same space, but within the mobile form factor they're hitting comparable performance numbers.

by runeks 4y ago

cyber_kinetist 4y ago

> This tells me that Apple could fit 32 performance cores in a laptop CPU I'm not too sure about that. The current 20-core CPU from Apple is inside the Mac Studio, and it has quite a monster of an air cooler. It's obviously going to be much harder to put that (or something more powerful) inside a laptop, even with all the chip improvements...

zozbot234 4y ago
Well of course it does, who wants to be thermally throttled on a desktop-class machine? You're assuming that desktop and laptop use must support the exact same scenarios which is not true among x86-64 users either.
runeks 4y ago
Interesting. Something’s not adding up here, though. 8 cores = “tiny fans basically always off” vs 20 cores = “two huge fans”. Either those two huge fans are running at a very low RPM, or the fans in the laptop are almost as efficient as the huge ones. I highly doubt the latter, so I assume the former is the case.
- sharikous 4y ago
  Really? MBP 13: 4 performance cores + 4 efficiency cores Mac Studio: 16 performance cores + 4 efficiency cores Not to mention that the more cores you have, the bigger the overhead of e.g. synchronizing between them becomes
rsynnott 4y ago
The M1 Ultra in the Studio apparently peaks at about 60W, so a laptop based on it would have lower peak power usage than an old 15" MBP (45W CPU, 35W GPU, usually).

zozbot234 4y ago

This is not comparing like for like, as we have yet to see how x86 does on those device fabbing nodes. And other ARM vendors are not really in the same space, but within the mobile form factor they're hitting comparable performance numbers.