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Seems to be based on the perspective that the focus is indeed on absolute performance gains rather than performance per power draw. Based on the range of devic
by davnicwil 3y ago
Seems to be based on the perspective that the focus is indeed on absolute performance gains rather than performance per power draw.
Based on the range of devices the M chips will be used for both immediately and in future it's not at all obvious that should be true. Think about the vision pro. Name of the game there is workable performance / battery tradeoff, not maxing out raw performance.
Same is true for most users of macbooks frankly, including (lots of) engineers using pros.
It wouldn't be surprising to me that an acceptable outcome of the shift to the new node was maintaining performance of M2 with gains in battery life. More performance will inevitably come with M4 etc anyway.
- spandrew 3y agoI think you nailed it. This is more than plausible, given Apple's penchant for valuing the packaging of technology (its application) over the sheer horsepower of cutting-edge tech. More performance per power draw would 100% fit with that and enable a lot of applications; Vision, Apple Watch, etc. It's amazing how often tech media works themselves over.
- superkuh 3y agoRight. Apple machines have never been top performers. The M* machines are just good compromise machines when you need to be mobile and are energy constrained. Or sometimes, if you spend $6000+, they can have competitive absolute performance specs, re: available RAM and RAM bandwidth for tasks like LLM.