8 ms·
I watched the first three Mad Max films last night, in one sitting...while there is certainly an argument for absolute performance over time, it's becoming a lo
by daviddever23box 3y ago
I watched the first three Mad Max films last night, in one sitting...while there is certainly an argument for absolute performance over time, it's becoming a lot more difficult to justify the power consumption of the current Intel (and, to a lesser degree, AMD) offerings, especially for sustained personal productivity and burst compilation tasks.
We cannot speak of performance without the per-watt quotient. Battery life is a real concern, and current Wintel laptops just don't compete.
Energy concerns are real (as depicted in the George Miller-directed films mentioned above), and it may be the case that the premium paid for Apple Silicon-based devices is actually a bargain.
- avidphantasm 3y agoYeah, my reaction the whole time to reading OP is, “now do performance per Watt…”
- cbsmith 3y agoThe chips it is being compared to are a year older. If there wasn't an advantage somewhere, it'd be an absolute failure.
- Salgat 3y agoIntel and AMD sell laptop chips with comparable performance per watt to M2 laptops. If you're buying an M2 Ultra desktop computer, your primary concern is performance period, not performance per watt.
- threeseed 3y agoBut many of us don't want that performance to come in a large tower that requires fans to be constantly running. I own a Mac Studio and PC 10980xe with 4090 and the latter has to live in a separate room because of the noise.
- LeoNatan25 3y agoI don’t know what tower case you are using, or what cooling system you have set up, but in modern times, if you hear much noise from your cooling solution, you have chosen components poorly. From fans to pumps to dampened cases, you could have build a relatively silent system.
- threeseed 3y agoWith a Mac Studio it isn't just relatively silent in almost cases it is silent. With a PC you still have case fans running because even with modern motherboards they don't support switching them off at low temperature. You need to be running special Windows software. And to cool the CPU you really need to be running AIO or dedicated water coolers which themselves will have 3 fans almost always running.
- TylerE 3y agoThe fans in a max studio never actually turn off… they’re just really really quiet, and I’ve never managed to actually make the fans come off idle, even maxing out all cores.
- washadjeffmad 3y agoIt takes sustained usage for the heatsink to saturate, and then the fans ramp up quickly. They do stay next to silent otherwise.
- tomnipotent 3y ago> cool the CPU you really need to be running AIO or dedicated water coolers There is no shortage of silent air coolers, such as the NH-D15, that are 20-30 dBA and undetectable unless the only noise in the room. It's usually stock case fans that are the culprit.
- threeseed 3y agoIf you're running a PC with a dedicated GPU then you will have minimum 6 extra fans. 3 for the GPU and 3 for the case. The latter are pretty noisy and constantly run.
- aunty_helen 3y agoThe ultra isn’t in laptops. The ultra in the Mac Pro starts at 7 grand, if you’re going to pay a 4 grand premium, is 200$ of extra power over its lifetime really that important? I have a m2 Max, the battery life is awe inspiring. M2 ultra doesn’t best the competition for its use case.
- ddingus 3y agoIt is not the dollars per watt that matters to many users. What matters more than people may realize is battery runtime. The Apple hardware just spanks x86 hardware, unless that hardware is fitted with a big battery, and or a secondary one. I typically run Lenovo hardware, and on my faster machine, I got a very large battery and could get 6 solid hours. And that is at a nice 3Ghz speed too. My current machine (i5) is far slower than the M1 and that hot running Lenovo. (i7) It has two batteries that can yield 5 to 7 hours. Those machines are heavier, slower, bigger, and just feel crappy compared to the M1 Air I have been using. And that thing is crazy good. Battery life is longer, sometimes by a considerable amount. It is great hardware, fast, easy to use, light, you name it.
- jay_kyburz 3y agoIf the chips are designed to sacrifice performance for power usage, then they have no place in a computer without a battery. Apple should assume that desktop machines have an unlimited power source, and that users want a maximum speed. That the users time is more expensive than the electricity being fed into the computer. Laptops, sure, sacrifice power to extend the battery. Apple does an excellent job here. The only reason you would buy one of these desktop machines is because you want to be in the Apple ecosystem.
- daviddever23box 3y agoSure they do, same as mobile chipsets end up Intel NUCs. You're ignoring a whole category of devices.
- jay_kyburz 3y agoI always though NUC's are designed to be cheap, quiet, and small, not power efficient. I don't think they run on battery power.
- Arcuru 3y agoIt's easier to make something small and quiet if it's power efficient. It will need to dissipate less heat.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- bee_rider 3y agoI ran one on battery power, IIRC some models run on voltages in the 12V-20V range, so it is pretty easy. Fun project. I got a portable monitor and keyboard, and… realized I’d reinvented the laptop, except it was really hard to balance all that stuff on my lap. Next time I just got a laptop, but I can still use all the old NUC peripherals so that is nice.
- lost_tourist 3y ago99% of the time I'm hooked up to a power source so battery life isn't nearly as important to me as the $$/performance ratio of the laptop.
- AnthonyMouse 3y ago> it's becoming a lot more difficult to justify the power consumption of the current Intel (and, to a lesser degree, AMD) offerings, especially for sustained personal productivity and burst compilation tasks. I don't get it. The M2 is 15W. There are mobile Ryzen APUs with the same TDP. They're about the same speed; maybe the M2 is a little faster for single thread and the PC is a little faster for multi-thread, it's not that different. You can get a PC laptop which is under 3 lbs and has 14+ hours of battery life. You can also get a PC laptop which is heavier and has a shorter battery life because they have no qualms about selling you what amounts to a desktop CPU which is then something like 30% faster for multi-thread. But nobody forces you to buy that one.
- pas 3y agocan someone recommend a concrete laptop then, please? I have been putting off the buying of a new one for years now. (I have an old XPS 13 and a P50 with an M1000M, so ... yeah, old dogs!) I want to put Linux on it. So far I have been looking at the legion 5 pro, because a friend got one recently, and seems amazing, though haven't yet got my hands on it long enough to try it with an USB stick with a recent Ubuntu (with a recent kernel) to test the power management feature support.
- ChrisLTD 3y agoFrom what I’ve read and seen, Linux is the worst option if you’re concerned about battery life.
- AnthonyMouse 3y agoThis is basically down to some hardware vendors writing crappy Linux drivers that don't include power saving features, while also not documenting the hardware so no one else can do it either. But that's only true of specific devices. For example, this is claimed to have 14 hours of battery life, on Linux: https://system76.com/laptops/lemur https://system76.com/laptops/lemur
- arp242 3y ago
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- thatfrenchguy 3y agoLol, indeed, the Intel chip they use for comparaison is 320W: https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/intel-core-i9-13900ks-cpu-review https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/intel-core-i9-13900ks-c...
- jayd16 3y agoYour use case is watching a movie? Wouldn't this just hit the hardware decoder on any of these chips? I guess I don't understand why you would want the ultra if you still prioritize TDP over performance.