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AMD promises its new laptop chips will crush the Apple M2 and it’s got receipts
- catchnear4321 3y agoIt will crush a year old chip. (By a little.) Competition is great. Clickbait is not.
- sp332 3y agoOh and what's this year's fastest Apple Silicon chip?
- catchnear4321 3y agoIt isn’t out yet. Does Apple upset you, yeah?
- sp332 3y agoThe M2 is a great chip. That's why I think a chip that can beat it would also be great. Since the M3 is not available, benchmarking against the M2 seems like a pretty reasonable thing to do. The M2 was a nice bump over the M1, and the M3 doesn't promise huge gains over the M2, so AMD's result here is still pretty exciting.
- out_of_protocol 3y agoActually M1 performance per watt is unbeatable, M2 has lower perfomance value per watt consumed. There almost zero chance AMD or Intel can release anything remotely close to M1
- luuurker 3y agoThey can't compare this processor to something that doesn't exist yet.
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- jacooper 3y ago> (By a little.) > and a whopping 72% better multiprocessing performance than the standard M2
- catchnear4321 3y agoWhich is impressive, but doesn’t necessarily mean much for the average consumer. More than it used to.
- ericpauley 3y agoThis just means it has more cores (edit: it’s using SMT and homogeneous cores for 16 logical cores). A more fair comparison would be against an M2 Pro. It has the same TDP as the pro.
- kmos17 3y agoGreat to see some competition coming but yeah sounds very clickbaity, it’s comparing the base M2 to what will apparently be the top of the line new AMD chip, instead of comparing it to the M2 max for example. “ the Ryzen 7 7840U, the initial flagship APU of the new series, apparently offers 9% better 3D rendering performance, 14% better responsiveness, and a whopping 72% better multiprocessing performance than the standard M2 There will be four new chips: the aforementioned Ryzen 7 7840U, the midrange Ryzen 5 7640U and 7540U, and the affordable Ryzen 3 7440U “ Also they’re not going to win on the marketing front with that naming strategy. Just awful. M1/2 and Pro/Max are so much simpler. It’s like Intel’s naming, such a mess.
- catchnear4321 3y agoApple hasn’t been flawless with naming, but does seem less clumsy on average. Intel’s latest move is just absurd.
- dragonwriter 3y ago> Apple hasn’t been flawless with naming, but does seem less clumsy on average. An extremely narrow range of SKU’s in a product line with an extremely short history makes that easier.
- aloknnikhil 3y agoThe range of SKUs is a problem AMD and Intel (particularly) brought upon themselves. It’s not easy for anyone trying to buy a laptop to truly estimate the power of the processor in there without first going through a review video. Id take the narrow range over that mess.
- dragonwriter 3y ago> The range of SKUs is a problem AMD and Intel (particularly) brought upon themselves. Its a problem for simplicity of naming, its not a problem beyond that (and the alternative is a problem if you aren’t a vertically integrated producer supporting a fairly narrow end-user product line.)
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- ricardobeat 3y agoWhat’s the problem with M1/M2 being great? It’s not a zero-sum game.
- DJBunnies 3y agoNot an Apple fanboy. My M1 is great.
- snvzz 3y ago>x86 is dead. RISC-V is inevitable.
- freehorse 3y agoEh before the M1s I really disliked macs, and cursed that I had to use some at work. Even now I prefer AMD for desktop. But the unparallel energy efficiency of apple silicon for laptops is just a fact, and I will believe that AMD or intel can challenge apple in laptops when I see it, because till now they are hopelessly far away.
- webaholic 3y agoIs there any article comparing benchmarks for the same power envelope between Apple and AMD/Intel laptops? All I find are comparisons with the desktop parts.
- ucm_edge 3y agoI notice the article only has base power draw in it. I’d want to know max TDP before anything gets crowned. This AMD is 15 watt base, the M2 is about 20 watts. When the M1 came out, Intel announced chips that would crush and crush it they did, while drawing significantly more power. Intel announced with a 45 watt base TDP which didn’t look too far off the M1 Max, but the 12th Intels ended up peaking at 115 watts for the 12900HK. It basically came down to if you were looking for something portable but would be plugged in when in use, the Intel offering was superior. If you wanted battery life, the Apple product remained superior. Competition is good and hopefully AMD remains power competitive, but given a 7800 runs around 88 watts in normal use conditions and has 120 watt max budget, I would expect that performance AMD is touting to come with higher power draw.
- ben-schaaf 3y agoThe 6850U had a peak of 35W (https://www.phoronix.com/review/amd-ryzen7-6850u/8 https://www.phoronix.com/review/amd-ryzen7-6850u/8). Around the same as the M2 Max apparently.
- ucm_edge 3y agoSadly at about about half the Geekbench 5 score. M2 is single core 2061, multicore 15281. 6850U has single 1469 and multi 7365 scores. M2 is also ahead in Cinebench R23 and splits the single and multi in R20 with the 6850U. To go from that to 70% ahead on multicore would be amazing because it would force Intel and Apple to respond. The cynic in me, having watched Intel and AMD fight for the desktop crown post Ryzen launch though is skeptical that the scores are some combo pushing power limits to rather undesirable levels and extremely selective benchmarking (It's 70% better at this one thing).
- yieldcrv 3y ago“crush” needs to be the same 8 hours of battery life, or more above 128gb RAM at the same speeds or better and then equivalent computational performance or better
- rfoo 3y ago> above 128gb RAM at the same speeds or better No way! That would be too expensive for us! To be able to really "crush" Apple, vendors MUST charge the same amount of money for RAM upgrade, and 8GB -> 128GB would be $3000!
- yieldcrv 3y agoI would consider paying a premium for the architecture
- jacooper 3y agoIt has lower TDP than the M2, so maybe better battery life. It already has better computational power
- lelanthran 3y ago> the same 8 hours of battery life, or more Why? My new M1 did maybe 5 hours on the battery. Got worse as it aged over a year.
- enraged_camel 3y agoThis is seriously surprising. My M1 Air lasts 12+ hours and M1 Pro lasts 10+ hours, and I’ve had both for about a year.
- capableweb 3y ago> My new M1 did maybe 5 hours on the battery > My M1 Air lasts 12+ hours and M1 Pro lasts 10+ hours Neither of you have said anything about how you spend your time on the laptop itself, which makes both numbers equally useless. Of course someone who spends their time compiling Rust projects and writing code will have less battery time than someone who writes emails and reads HN most of the day. But we have no way of knowing if this is what's happening. But my guess is that your usage patterns are different.
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- erratic_chargi 3y agoSo does it mean a passively cooled laptop like MacBook Air?, I mean the M2 performance are good but what makes it attractive are battery life and fanless yet capable laptop.
- capableweb 3y agoMaybe fanless is important for people who don't use the laptop for work, but as someone who mainly works with computers and not much leisure, I don't care if it's fanless or not, as long as it doesn't throttle just because something compiles for 3 minutes instead of 20 seconds and uses all the cores to the max. Usually, passively cooled laptops are really poor at that, compared to ones that have active cooling.
- fbdab103 3y agoA fanless-first design would mean I am not subject to the continual whine of whatever teeny high RPM fans that come standard. As someone stuck on corporate Windows machines, I have 24/7 fan noise from the combination of work-spyware + Teams + Onedrive continually indexing and stomping over each other. Edit: I rarely do much CPU limited workloads. More RAM heavy than anything else.
- reaperman 3y agoThe MacBook Pro often completely turns off its fan, no? I almost never hear it/feel it so it seems like it’s off to me.
- coldcode 3y agoI have an M1 Ultra Mac Studio and I routinely push its 20 cores, yet I've never heard a fan, if it even has one.
- plorkyeran 3y agoThe Mac Studio actually has a low RPM always-on fan. It's quiet enough that it can get away with that, and not turning it on and off avoids the noticeable transitions in volume. Under very heavy load the fan speeds up slightly.
- lucabs 3y ago[dead]
- api 3y agoThe thing to crush about the M chips is performance per watt, not raw performance. They are respectable chips performance wise but Intel and AMD have faster (but hotter) chips. But as far as I know there is still nothing that beats them for efficiency, at least for the high performance desktop and laptop oriented market.
- capableweb 3y agoAs long as you don't start counting watt/performance/price, as then usually AMD wins out as Apple does have "premium" pricing for most (if not all) of their products
- sedatk 3y agoI’m sure most people are willing to pay M2-level premium for a fanless, cool, performant laptop with very long battery life.
- capableweb 3y agoAs I said elsewhere (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35854112 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35854112), if I could chose between a fanless M2 laptop that might throttle, and a M2 laptop with fans that would never throttle, I know for sure what I and many other developers would go for.
- api 3y agoThat’s the MacBook Pro. It pretty much never throttles. You have to really push it to get the fans to do much though.
- tomduncalf 3y agoThe only time I’ve heard the fans on my M1 Max is running ML stuff (Demucs) across every core for several minutes, so the CPU was completely maxed out. Even then it was quiet. Day to day for me it hardly ever gets warm and I never hear the fans.
- tiffanyh 3y agoHow will this compare per watt? The Apple M-series is 3x more performant per watt than anything else. Perf Per Watt (bigger is better): M1 298 M2 297 AMD 5600U 90 AMD 6800U 78 Intel 1240P 64 https://www.notebookcheck.net/Apple-M2-SoC-Analysis-Worse-CPU-efficiency-compared-to-the-M1.637834.0.html https://www.notebookcheck.net/Apple-M2-SoC-Analysis-Worse-CP...
- out_of_protocol 3y agoM1 value seems wrong, should be 407 Different test: Cinebench R23 Multi Package Power Efficiency M1 - 561 pts/watt M2 - 433 AMD Ryzen 7 6800U - 374 Intel Core i5-1240P - 258
- jml7c5 3y agoThose are the "multi package" numbers. Though exactly what "single" vs "multi" means in this context is unclear to me.
- wtallis 3y ago"Cinebench R23 Multi" and "Cinebench R23 Single" are the software workloads used (multi-thread and single-thread). "Package Power" specifies (approximately) where the power is measured and what components are included—but reviewers like NotebookCheck aren't equipped to actually measure power at the chip or package level, so they're actually relying on software estimates that add another layer of vendor-specific sources of error on top of the inconsistencies about what's in the package (eg. Apple puts DRAM in the package but Intel and AMD don't).
- senttoschool 3y agoCinebench uses Intel Embree, which is library that is hand optimized for x86 instructions. It should not be used to compare ARM vs x86 CPUS. Geekbench is better here.
- binkHN 3y agoFor those just reading the comments, the article mentions the 7000 series chips and the numbers here reflect the prior generation.
- fbdab103 3y agoDoes anyone know the state of linux scheduling and efficiency cores? It is my understanding that part of what makes the Apple experience smooth is tight control over what processes get pinned to performance cores and enforcing background jobs remain as such. For example, the Gnome indexer, tracker-miner, should only ever be allocated to background status.
- schaefer 3y agoAMD doesn't have efficiency cores (yet). on the X86 side, only intel does (for now).
- beebeepka 3y agoThe AMD effecincy cores are just regular cores with a lot less cache, no? This is what Zen 4c is
- schaefer 3y agoyou were right[1], I was wrong. [1]: https://www.hardwaretimes.com/amds-first-hybrid-core-big-little-cpu-allegedly-spotted-2-big-and-4-small-cores/ https://www.hardwaretimes.com/amds-first-hybrid-core-big-lit...
- goosedragons 3y agoNo, that's only on 3D models and they're not efficiency cores, they're just cores without access to the extra cache. They're actually clocked higher.
- nimbius 3y agoNot really surprising. The m2 is just the same concept as the amd apu, but with sleeker branding and marketing. Amd has been doing apu since 2011, ages longer than apple The whole m2 hootenany on hn reminded me of when retina came out. Its just a fancy branding for a hidpi display. Nothing inherently special.
- astrange 3y agoYou can't get HiDPI displays from anyone else, and nobody else can do the software right because they insist on trying to support arbitrary resolution instead of just 2x.
- brokenmachine 3y ago?? I was looking into buying a new OLED laptop a while back... Macbook Pro - 2560x1600, 227ppi Asus Zenbook Pro 16X OLED 60Hz - 3840x2400, 283ppi Asus Vivobook Pro 14 OLED 16:10 90Hz - 2880x1800, 243ppi Asus ZenBook Pro 14 Duo OLED 120Hz 16:10 - 2880x1800, 234ppi etc etc etc. I'm sure there's other brands.
- astrange 3y agoCan you do bigger than 16"?
- rsynnott 3y agoAs far as desktop monitors go, there's ye olde LG Ultrafine 5K, and that's about your lot. There used to be a Dell, too, but, as is standard with exotic Dell monitors, they rapidly discontinued it.
- EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 3y agoGigabyte Aero 15 OLED, 3840 x 2160, 282 PPI, 60 Hz. And, unlike Macbook, it can put those pixels to good gaming use with a 3080 GPU.
- sgt 3y ago
- freehorse 3y ago_They will burn them all_ Seriously, I do not doubt the performance (I hope they do not melt their cpus and motherboards this time), but energy efficiency, which is important in laptops? I will believe it when I see it (by in depth reviews, not by what benchmarks companies release), considering the desktop ryzen 7000s got to a completely different direction. Intel had made some ridiculous energy efficiency claims in their last generation that were totally out of reality in practice.
- wtallis 3y agoThe desktop Ryzen 7000 parts are still saddled with power-hungry die-to-die interconnects and an IO die that's built on an older fab process (though not quite as old as previous Ryzen IO dies), so the idle power is horrible. And the parts without the 3D stacked L3 cache will happily crank up the voltage to crazy levels in order to get the last few percent of clock speed. But if you cap their power/voltage/frequency to reasonable levels and look at the power consumed by just the CPU cores, it's clear that AMD has a very promising building block to use for their monolithic mobile processors. But I agree that AMD's marketing claims as filtered through low-quality journalism that doesn't even distinguish between peak and base power consumption is a poor way to judge whether AMD has succeeded in building a great low-power processor.
- freehorse 3y agoWell I do not take any claims of any company seriously before I see actual reviews anyway, they usually just cherry pick what they want, so I do not specifically blame AMD for that. And yeah I agree, we run our new AMD desktops in eco mode at work, it was ridiculous to routinely get like 95C temperatures for whatever random chores. Once we used to overclock AMD cpus, nowadays we underclock them lol. I have not really checked how many watts it draws after we put them in eco mode though, I will do it next time.
- AshamedCaptain 3y agoAnd notebookcheck reports the idle power on the new gen of laptop chips is actually worse than on the previous gen.
- morkalork 3y agoIf you told my past self from the mid/late 2000s that the future chip wars would be between AMD and Apple, I would not have believed you at all!
- giantrobot 3y ago"What, did AMD switch to PowerPC?!"
- phendrenad2 3y agoActually kind of funny that PowerPC being RISC could probably have been a contender for the M1.
- pavlov 3y agoMaybe not so implausible? AMD had a good run with the Athlon/K7 and the K8. The latter was so successful that Intel was forced to adopt its 64-bit ISA. The Pentium 4 (NetBurst) was a dead end design, and Intel had to backtrack and build off their laptop CPUs that were based on the older Pentium Pro design. Apple bought P.A. Semi in 2008, a company founded by Daniel Dobberpuhl of DEC Alpha fame. Clearly they had something brewing on the CPU front.
- mort96 3y agoApple "clearly had something brewing on the CPU front" sure, they were just getting into the mobile phone industry; hearing that Apple would eventually make their own smartphone chips wouldn't have been surprising. What might've been surprising is them getting into the big, high performance desktop-class CPU segment and leading the industry in efficiency and performance HEDT chips for desktops. And Intel's relative irrelevance is certainly surprising, as is them losing the fab game to TSMC.
- nordsieck 3y ago> The Pentium 4 (NetBurst) was a dead end design, and Intel had to backtrack and build off their laptop CPUs that were based on the older Pentium Pro design. Don't forget Itanium, Intel's other dead end architecture. It's actually kind of amazing that Intel recovered from both at the same time (for the most part).
- amluto 3y agoI want this as a server. It has 20 PCIe lanes (not sure whether the integrated GPU uses any of them), so getting 4x NVMe plus 10 or even 25 GigE should be possible. Bonus points for a server platform like this that still has a battery.
- datadeft 3y ago[flagged]
- luuurker 3y agoAre they supposed to keep making power hungry processors until they create their own OS?
- robotnikman 3y agoI hope whatever they put out ends up in the next Steam Deck
- Slackwise 3y ago> After all, AMD already makes the chips that power our modern consoles, from the Nintendo Switch Uh, the Switch is an NVIDIA Tegra SoC...
- beebeepka 3y agoIndeed. A chip no one even wanted. I guess it kind of worked for them, tho.
- coffeebeqn 3y agoThat’s what they do. They buy extreme value from a few generations ago and then sell it for $200-300.
- zitterbewegung 3y agoSure just in time for the M3 to come out right ?
- intellix 3y agoThe previous generation of laptops from Apple were so bad that I'll be vice-like gripping my M1 laptop hard before even looking at the benchmarks. Performance alone is such a bad metric to even mention cause I just think about being 15% throttled 99% of the time, having a huge WHIRRRRRR and only lasting about 1 hour. God it still hurts so much
- exabrial 3y agoI can't believe how much we've been focused on core speed when memory bandwidth and latency has been such a huge issue... at least for my workloads. My stuff screams on a M1 Chip.
- wmf 3y agoAMD and Intel have the same 128-bit LPDDR5-6400 as the M2.
- dmitrygr 3y agoDo point me to an x86 laptop I can buy with 100GB/s of memory bandwidth to the CPU.
- wtallis 3y agoWhat exactly are you asking for here? Because you've already been informed that AMD and Intel systems using LPDDR5 at the same speed and bus width are now available. On paper, every new laptop using soldered LPDDR is now over 100GB/s for DRAM bandwidth. Are you asking for synthetic benchmark results comparing achievable throughput against theoretical bandwidth, or are you just being obtuse?
- dmitrygr 3y agoI am asking for a name of one that has been demonstrated to actually do that. Not promise. Not “on paper”. Actually do. Extra credit if it actually exists in a store to actually buy. Today.
- bitL 3y agoAMD should really stop with this crappy marketing and look at how many of their promises evaporated quickly once people tried their new products. Radeon fiascos all the time, alienating Threadripper users by false promises, blown up Ryzen 7k3Ds running on voltages from marketing materials, crappy x3D hybrid CCD architecture disadvantaging many workloads etc. Somebody should tell their marketing team something unpleasant but needed.
- bdcravens 3y agoFor it to crush the M*, it needs to have similar thermo characteristics.
- berjin 3y agoEven if were twice as performant as M2 the windows laptop companies would ruin it with their tacky plastic chassis and tiny little touchpad.
- jacooper 3y agoHave you even seen modern windows laptops?
- rfoo 3y agoApple already ruined their laptops with the heavy-ish metal chassis. Even the new MacBook Air is ~1.24kg. Windows laptop companies, please DO NOT follow suit! Though some of them already did so, sigh. Please Apple, please just replace your shiny aluminum with plastic (or some better alloy) and make your fanless offering 1kg.
- xracy 3y agoAre they finally gonna adopt ARM? My understanding is a lot of the performance improvements from M2 is that improving efficiency for the x64 isa is hitting diminishing returns. We've optimized it pretty well, but there's also a lot of cruft, so you have to build subinstructions that hide your actual isa to keep it going. Feels like the next big "easy" win for intel and amd would be to actually make the switch. (Easy in quotations, because I imagine the first few iterations would actually be a fair bit more work).
- WhereIsTheTruth 3y agoM2 is already 1 year old So "crushing" M2 2 years later doesn't sound impressive at all..
- esjeon 3y agoApple did exactly that on their keynote for M1 by comparing it to an old AMD. I really hated it because it's not quite Apple to pull cheap tricks like that.
- brokenmachine 3y agoI'm happy if it means I can have an ultra-quiet laptop without needing to tolerate MacOS.
- jacooper 3y agoOr poor ARM support
- WhereIsTheTruth 3y agohuh, macOS is part of the reason mac and especially Apple chips were all well received, it's the whole experience and ecosystem, chip without software is useless
- brokenmachine 3y agoI'll take Linux or Windows with ARM thanks. Apple ecosystem/jail is worse than useless to me.
- brokenmachine 3y agoEven though I hate Apple as a company, the one tech trend that they've championed that I'm all for is the quiet/fanless laptops.
- kaycey2022 3y agoA Macbook Air's computing power is good enough for me. Will the new AMD chips be able to compete with M2's battery life while offering similar or more computing power is the big question. Does WSL drain the windows battery faster? I don't think most of the people using Macbooks care about Cinebench or gaming performance.