4 ms·

> We simply aren’t going to see x86 get to the subjective “apple experience” of a laptop that runs equally well on or off battery, with day-long life during int

> We simply aren’t going to see x86 get to the subjective “apple experience” of a laptop that runs equally well on or off battery, with day-long life during interactive low-intensity usage I disagree. Apple themselves showed what you could do with an x86 processor in terms of battery life long before they went to ARM, and most manufacturers still aren’t even close. People have been talking about the amazing life in their products for ages before arm. Meanwhile I can’t get my windows laptop to not burn itself up in my bag with an update, which also coincidentally uses a ton of battery power as the fans cool itself on full tilt

paulmd 2y ago
As an owner of an ice lake macbook I can tell you definitively that it’s still utter shit compared to the apple silicon ones. Best case scenario it idles at 14w system power, while my 2020 m1 mba idled at <5w and sometimes <3w at very long idle. Usually if it’s not totally idle it idles at 22w. And again, this is the problem, light load produces quite a lot of power consumption on x86 compared to arm. I bought it for the meme, it was a laugh and I wanted a late-gen x86 model with no dGPU to give x86 the best shot (mostly bought it for windows use actually). But the “it’s just macOS/optimization magic!!!” isn’t true either. x86 MacBooks still fucking suck, even the ones without the absolutely shit-tastic AMD dGPUs onboard. Those idle at closer to 50w if you have a display plugged in, btw. There’s no way to turn them off because the display outputs are hardwired to the gpu, if you are using an external display the dGPU is forced on. I tried, my old work MacBook was an i9 and it fucking sucked during the summer. The idea that macOS is just uniquely lightweight and can somehow wring better perf/w out of computational tasks than Linux or windows just isn’t supportable either. Certainly if it were true it would also show up in MT and not just 1T loads. Reality is perf/w is mostly a constraint of the processor and not the OS… just like the OS can’t magically make applications use less ram and “turn 8gb into 16gb” either. It takes X cycles for Y processor to execute Cinebench and the OS does not matter that much in the big picture. It maybe does help with sleep states and idle power, things like grand central scheduling. But 1T load is a load state, not idle.
- ac29 2y ago
  > As an owner of an ice lake macbook I can tell you definitively that it’s still utter shit compared to the apple silicon ones. Best case scenario it idles at 14w system power That really surprising since my 8th gen intel laptop (2 generations older than ice lake) idled at under 5W in Linux. So does my newer 12th gen intel laptop.
  - paulmd 2y ago
    I would assume that’s packagd power and I mean total system power, using the “stats” cask with the average system power sensor. I will play with it and see if I can get package power. But the overall point is that even looking at total system power - the apple silicon is silly efficient. It’s actually meaningfully better than x86 in literally every way you choose to measure it.

paulmd 2y ago

As an owner of an ice lake macbook I can tell you definitively that it’s still utter shit compared to the apple silicon ones. Best case scenario it idles at 14w system power, while my 2020 m1 mba idled at <5w and sometimes <3w at very long idle. Usually if it’s not totally idle it idles at 22w. And again, this is the problem, light load produces quite a lot of power consumption on x86 compared to arm. I bought it for the meme, it was a laugh and I wanted a late-gen x86 model with no dGPU to give x86 the best shot (mostly bought it for windows use actually). But the “it’s just macOS/optimization magic!!!” isn’t true either. x86 MacBooks still fucking suck, even the ones without the absolutely shit-tastic AMD dGPUs onboard. Those idle at closer to 50w if you have a display plugged in, btw. There’s no way to turn them off because the display outputs are hardwired to the gpu, if you are using an external display the dGPU is forced on. I tried, my old work MacBook was an i9 and it fucking sucked during the summer. The idea that macOS is just uniquely lightweight and can somehow wring better perf/w out of computational tasks than Linux or windows just isn’t supportable either. Certainly if it were true it would also show up in MT and not just 1T loads. Reality is perf/w is mostly a constraint of the processor and not the OS… just like the OS can’t magically make applications use less ram and “turn 8gb into 16gb” either. It takes X cycles for Y processor to execute Cinebench and the OS does not matter that much in the big picture. It maybe does help with sleep states and idle power, things like grand central scheduling. But 1T load is a load state, not idle.

ac29 2y ago
> As an owner of an ice lake macbook I can tell you definitively that it’s still utter shit compared to the apple silicon ones. Best case scenario it idles at 14w system power That really surprising since my 8th gen intel laptop (2 generations older than ice lake) idled at under 5W in Linux. So does my newer 12th gen intel laptop.
- paulmd 2y ago
  I would assume that’s packagd power and I mean total system power, using the “stats” cask with the average system power sensor. I will play with it and see if I can get package power. But the overall point is that even looking at total system power - the apple silicon is silly efficient. It’s actually meaningfully better than x86 in literally every way you choose to measure it.