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Power efficiency is a curve, and Apple may have its own reason not to make M1 Pro run at 110W as well

sm_1024 2y ago
I think the OC might have mis-read the power numbers, 110 W is well into desktop CPU power range. Here is a excerpt from Anand Tech: > In our peak power test, the Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 ramped up and peaked at 33 W. https://www.anandtech.com/show/21485/the-amd-ryzen-ai-hx-370-review/2 https://www.anandtech.com/show/21485/the-amd-ryzen-ai-hx-370...
- hajile 2y ago
  You can read the notebookcheck review for yourself. https://www.notebookcheck.net/AMD-Zen-5-Strix-Point-CPU-analysis-Ryzen-AI-9-HX-370-versus-Intel-Core-Ultra-Apple-M3-and-Qualcomm-Snapdragon-X-Elite.868641.0.html https://www.notebookcheck.net/AMD-Zen-5-Strix-Point-CPU-anal...
  - ac29 2y ago
    Those 100W+ numbers are total system power. And that system has the CPU TDP set to 80W (far above AMD's official max of 54W). It also has a discrete 4070 GPU that can use over 100W on its own.
    - paulmd 2y ago
      if x86 laptops have 90w of platform power, that’s a thing that’s concerning in itself, not a reasonable defense. Remember, apple laptops have screens too, etc, and that shows up in the average system power measurements the same way. What's the difference in an x86 laptop? I really doubt it's actually platform power, the problem is that x86 is boosting up to 35W average/60W peak per thread. 120W package power isn't unexpected, if you're boosting 3-4 cores to maximum! And that's the problem. x86 is far far worse at race-to-sleep. It's not just "macos has better scheduling"... you can see from the 1T power measurements that x86 is simply drawing 2-3x the power while it's racing-to-sleep, for performance that's roughly equivalent to ARM. Whatever the cause, whether it's just bad design from AMD and Intel, or legacy x86 cruft (I don't get how this applies to actual computational load though, as opposed to situations like idle power), or what... there is no getting around the fact that M2 tops out at 10W per core and a 8840HS or HX370 or Intel Meteor Lake are boosting to 30-35W at 1T loads.
hajile 2y ago
I stacked the deck in AMD's favor using a 3-year-old chip on an older node. Why is AMD using 3.6x more power than M1 to get just 32% higher performance while having 17% more cores? Why are AMD's cores nearly 2x the size despite being on a better node and having 3 more years to work on them? Why are Apple's scores the same on battery while AMD's scores drop dramatically? Apple does have a reason not to run at 120w -- it doesn't need to. Meanwhile, if AMD used the same 33w, nobody would buy their chips because performance would be so incredibly bad.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- pickledish 2y ago
  You should try not to talk so confidently about things you don't know about -- this statement > if AMD used the same 33w, nobody would buy their chips because performance would be so incredibly bad Is completely incorrect, as another commenter (and I think the notebookcheck article?) point out -- 30w is about the sweet spot for these processors, and the reason that 110w laptop seems so inefficient is because it's giving the APU 80w of TDP, which is a bit silly since it only performs marginally better than if you gave it e.g. 30 watts. It's not a good idea to take that example as a benchmark for the APU's efficiency, it varies depending on how much TDP you give the processor, and 80w is not a good TDP for these
  - hajile 2y ago
    Halo products with high scores sell chips. This isn’t a new idea. So you lower the wattage down. Now you’re at M1 Pro levels of performance with 17% more cores and nearly double the die area and barely competing with a chip 3 years older while on a newer, more expensive node too. That’s not selling me on your product (and that’s without mentioning the worst core latency I’ve seen in years when going between P and C cores).
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]

I think the OC might have mis-read the power numbers, 110 W is well into desktop CPU power range. Here is a excerpt from Anand Tech: > In our peak power test, the Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 ramped up and peaked at 33 W. https://www.anandtech.com/show/21485/the-amd-ryzen-ai-hx-370-review/2 https://www.anandtech.com/show/21485/the-amd-ryzen-ai-hx-370...

hajile 2y ago
You can read the notebookcheck review for yourself. https://www.notebookcheck.net/AMD-Zen-5-Strix-Point-CPU-analysis-Ryzen-AI-9-HX-370-versus-Intel-Core-Ultra-Apple-M3-and-Qualcomm-Snapdragon-X-Elite.868641.0.html https://www.notebookcheck.net/AMD-Zen-5-Strix-Point-CPU-anal...
- ac29 2y ago
  Those 100W+ numbers are total system power. And that system has the CPU TDP set to 80W (far above AMD's official max of 54W). It also has a discrete 4070 GPU that can use over 100W on its own.
  - paulmd 2y ago
    if x86 laptops have 90w of platform power, that’s a thing that’s concerning in itself, not a reasonable defense. Remember, apple laptops have screens too, etc, and that shows up in the average system power measurements the same way. What's the difference in an x86 laptop? I really doubt it's actually platform power, the problem is that x86 is boosting up to 35W average/60W peak per thread. 120W package power isn't unexpected, if you're boosting 3-4 cores to maximum! And that's the problem. x86 is far far worse at race-to-sleep. It's not just "macos has better scheduling"... you can see from the 1T power measurements that x86 is simply drawing 2-3x the power while it's racing-to-sleep, for performance that's roughly equivalent to ARM. Whatever the cause, whether it's just bad design from AMD and Intel, or legacy x86 cruft (I don't get how this applies to actual computational load though, as opposed to situations like idle power), or what... there is no getting around the fact that M2 tops out at 10W per core and a 8840HS or HX370 or Intel Meteor Lake are boosting to 30-35W at 1T loads.

hajile 2y ago

I stacked the deck in AMD's favor using a 3-year-old chip on an older node. Why is AMD using 3.6x more power than M1 to get just 32% higher performance while having 17% more cores? Why are AMD's cores nearly 2x the size despite being on a better node and having 3 more years to work on them? Why are Apple's scores the same on battery while AMD's scores drop dramatically? Apple does have a reason not to run at 120w -- it doesn't need to. Meanwhile, if AMD used the same 33w, nobody would buy their chips because performance would be so incredibly bad.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
pickledish 2y ago
You should try not to talk so confidently about things you don't know about -- this statement > if AMD used the same 33w, nobody would buy their chips because performance would be so incredibly bad Is completely incorrect, as another commenter (and I think the notebookcheck article?) point out -- 30w is about the sweet spot for these processors, and the reason that 110w laptop seems so inefficient is because it's giving the APU 80w of TDP, which is a bit silly since it only performs marginally better than if you gave it e.g. 30 watts. It's not a good idea to take that example as a benchmark for the APU's efficiency, it varies depending on how much TDP you give the processor, and 80w is not a good TDP for these
- hajile 2y ago
  Halo products with high scores sell chips. This isn’t a new idea. So you lower the wattage down. Now you’re at M1 Pro levels of performance with 17% more cores and nearly double the die area and barely competing with a chip 3 years older while on a newer, more expensive node too. That’s not selling me on your product (and that’s without mentioning the worst core latency I’ve seen in years when going between P and C cores).
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]