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They are desktop only, but conceptually they're still much more like mobile chips. With M-series CPUs Apple is either targeting limited power consumption instea
by reisse 3y ago
They are desktop only, but conceptually they're still much more like mobile chips. With M-series CPUs Apple is either targeting limited power consumption instead of going for max performance (which is a characteristic of mobile chips), or the chips just does not scale to high-end x86 territory despite any possible power consumption increase.
Either way, as soon as power consumption does not matter, price-performance (well, even both price _or_ performance, separately) wise M-series is not competitive with top x86 CPUs.
- xcv123 3y agoYes it is based on a mobile optimized architecture but M2 Ultra is scoring ~90% as high as the top model Intel i9-13900KS on Geekbench 6. It's up there with Intels best. And it's keeping up on the CPU side while having a massive GPU bolted on the die. https://browser.geekbench.com/v6/cpu/compare/3353019?baseline=3337733 https://browser.geekbench.com/v6/cpu/compare/3353019?baselin... Also noticed the M2 is faster than Intel on the Clang benchmark. (The Clang workload uses the Clang compiler to compile the Lua interpreter - https://www.geekbench.com/doc/geekbench6-cpu-workloads.pdf https://www.geekbench.com/doc/geekbench6-cpu-workloads.pdf). One thing to note regarding the M2 Ultra (from Apple marketing): "It has dedicated, hardware-enabled H. 264, HEVC, and ProRes encode and decode, allowing M2 Ultra to play back up to 22 streams of 8K ProRes 422 video — far more than any PC chip can do." Would need an expensive GPU or hardware accelerator to match that capability on the Intel side. The companies that use these machines probably don't even consider the $500 cost difference versus a Dell Precision workstation or whatever.