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"Thin and fanless" aren't that hard, just use any low power CPU. But then people also want fast. Apple does this by buying out TSMC's capacity for the latest

"Thin and fanless" aren't that hard, just use any low power CPU. But then people also want fast. Apple does this by buying out TSMC's capacity for the latest process nodes and then taking the performance/efficiency trade off in favor of efficiency, so they get something with similar performance and lower power consumption. But then they charge you $400 for $50 worth of RAM and solder it so you can't upgrade it yourself. The thing to realize is that fans are not required to spin, and the difference between the faster and slower processors are the clock speed rather than the transistors. So what you want is exactly what the OP requested: A laptop with fans in it, but you can turn them off. Then the CPU gets capped at a 15W TDP, has basically the same single-thread performance but is slower on threaded workloads, and it's no longer possible for Chrome to make your laptop loud. But if you want to open up Blender you still have the option to move up the fan slider and make it go faster.

thecompilr 2y ago
The M1 was made on 5nm which have long been available to AMD and other competitors in volume.
- AnthonyMouse 2y ago
  Fast is relative. The Ryzen HX 370 has a TDP configurable down to 15W and at that power level it could be run fanless and would be faster than the M1, but it's still faster yet if you give it 54W and raise the clock speed.
  - aurareturn 2y ago
    I'm going to need source on that. What does HX 370 score at 10w?
    - AnthonyMouse 2y ago
      You're asking for a benchmark result for a CPU which just came out and has a configurable TDP that hardly anybody is going to have set to its lowest value, if they even disclose it, much less have done so in a test against the original M1. If you think a source for that even exists you can provide a link. But the result seems pretty obvious. Even the 7nm Ryzen U-series at 15W (e.g. 7730U) was beating the 5nm M1 on multi-threaded workloads and the HX 370 is well ahead of both on single-thread performance. Single-thread workloads aren't significantly power limited, so to not be the case the Zen5 HX 370 would have to be slower than the Zen3 7730U on threaded workloads at the same TDP, which seems unlikely.
      - aurareturn 2y ago
        >But the result seems pretty obvious. Even the 7nm Ryzen U-series at 15W (e.g. 7730U) was beating the 5nm M1 on multi-threaded workloads and the HX 370 is well ahead of both on single-thread performance. Single-thread workloads aren't significantly power limited, so to not be the case the Zen5 HX 370 would have to be slower than the Zen3 7730U on threaded workloads at the same TDP, which seems unlikely. Again, would like a source on that. Please no Cinebench R23.
        AnthonyMouse 2y ago
        7730U (7nm) vs. M1 (5nm) for MT: https://nanoreview.net/en/cpu-compare/apple-m1-vs-amd-ryzen-7-7730u https://nanoreview.net/en/cpu-compare/apple-m1-vs-amd-ryzen-... Faster in Passmark MT, basically tied in Geekbench MT, faster in average MT score. HX 370 vs. M1: https://nanoreview.net/en/cpu-compare/apple-m1-vs-amd-ryzen-ai-9-hx-370 https://nanoreview.net/en/cpu-compare/apple-m1-vs-amd-ryzen-... Faster in everything, ST and MT. ST difference is significant, MT difference is huge. Obviously this is expected because in this comparison AMD has the process advantage, but the expected thing is indeed what happens.
        aurareturn 2y ago
        Let's not use Passmark MT. Stick to the better benchmarks that are optimized for both ARM and x86. GB5 and GB6, M1 is faster in MT despite having 4 fewer cores. If you can find SPEC scores, that'd be great too. HX 370 vs M1, what's the perf/watt for SPEC and GB5/6 and Cinebench 2024? HX370 consumes a lot more power. Hence, there aren't any fanless laptops available for it. 4 years later, AMD's chips still can't work in a fanless laptop.
        AnthonyMouse 2y ago
        > Let's not use Passmark MT. Stick to the better benchmarks that are optimized for both ARM and x86. At some point you just run out of benchmarks. The majority of benchmarks people ordinarily use already don't run on Macs. > GB5 and GB6, M1 is faster in MT despite having 4 fewer cores. It has the same number of cores as the 7730U. Half the M1's cores are E-cores, but that should be an advantage on a comparison at a given power level because E-cores have better performance per watt. The M1 gets within the margin of error of the same MT score on the benchmark you actually like even though the M1 is built on a newer process. > HX 370 vs M1, what's the perf/watt for SPEC and GB5/6 and Cinebench 2024? You keep asking for benchmarks that probably nobody has published. > HX370 consumes a lot more power. Hence, there aren't any fanless laptops available for it. It has a configurable TDP down to 15W. You can make a laptop that passively dissipates 15W. But you can also make a laptop with a fan in it which is capable of higher performance from the same silicon and then have a setting for "silent mode" that lets you switch between them at will. People generally like that better so that's what they make.
  - schmidtleonard 2y ago
    Is that the chip AMD just released? Isn't the M1 about 4 years old?
    - AnthonyMouse 2y ago
      The premise is that others can now use the same process as the M1 did to make fanless CPUs. Which they can, but they could always make fanless CPUs. The issue is that people also want them to be fast, which is not an absolute measurement fixed for all time, it's relative to competing contemporary systems with more cooling, which will always be faster.
ThatMedicIsASpy 2y ago
Don't run Windows and you don't need fast. Unfortunately Linux on notebooks is always a dice roll of random features (cam, fingerprint, ..) not working. There is a lot of older hardware running like crap because Windows just bloats up.
- diffeomorphism 2y ago
  So is running MacOS on non-apple laptops or running windows on chromebooks. Preinstalled is another story, of course, you paid someone to make sure all those random features work. That said, defaults seem often wrong and defaults matter. For instance, I recently got an HP Elitebook with an amd 7840hs because for some reason the _u version was tied to a lower res screen. By default it runs high powered and then the fan is loud enough to be annoying. Set it it to balanced or low power and the fan is inaudible.
MobiusHorizons 2y ago
I know everyone on this site loves to hate on soldered ram, but my impression is most people don’t understand that soldered ram is not the same thing as regular ram modules. They are literally different memory chips (LPDDR vs DDR) . When built to a specific chip my understanding is you can design for tighter timings and higher bandwidth which is important for the gpu. The M1 shipped with very fast LPDDR4X running at 4266MT/s which was even pretty fast by XMP desktop speeds at the time (2020). There are real engineering advantages to soldered ram especially if the memory controller has need designed with to take advantage of it. I guess it is similar to how gpu memory configurations are specialized and not modular.
- ulyssys 2y ago
  The objection to soldered RAM isn’t the RAM.
- AnthonyMouse 2y ago
  You're making two separate points here. The first is the timings, which is nominally real but it was never a huge difference. Moreover, the new CAMM standard aims to address this and basically does. The legacy SODIMM standard wasn't great and is essentially what caused this. The second is the bus width. If you use slotted memory and want a wide bus then you need at least one slot per channel and then you could end up needing a lot of slots. This isn't impossible -- servers do it -- but there is a cost attached to it. But this doesn't apply to systems that aren't using a wide bus. The base M3 has the same bus width as ordinary dual-channel PCs. The Pro has the equivalent of four channels or, for the newer generation, three. That's still not a crazy number in a high end system. With CAMM it would only be two modules, since the modules are each 128-bit. By way of comparison, Threadripper has four or eight channels and modern servers have dozens.

thecompilr 2y ago

The M1 was made on 5nm which have long been available to AMD and other competitors in volume.

AnthonyMouse 2y ago
Fast is relative. The Ryzen HX 370 has a TDP configurable down to 15W and at that power level it could be run fanless and would be faster than the M1, but it's still faster yet if you give it 54W and raise the clock speed.
- aurareturn 2y ago
  I'm going to need source on that. What does HX 370 score at 10w?
  - AnthonyMouse 2y ago
    You're asking for a benchmark result for a CPU which just came out and has a configurable TDP that hardly anybody is going to have set to its lowest value, if they even disclose it, much less have done so in a test against the original M1. If you think a source for that even exists you can provide a link. But the result seems pretty obvious. Even the 7nm Ryzen U-series at 15W (e.g. 7730U) was beating the 5nm M1 on multi-threaded workloads and the HX 370 is well ahead of both on single-thread performance. Single-thread workloads aren't significantly power limited, so to not be the case the Zen5 HX 370 would have to be slower than the Zen3 7730U on threaded workloads at the same TDP, which seems unlikely.
    - aurareturn 2y ago
      >But the result seems pretty obvious. Even the 7nm Ryzen U-series at 15W (e.g. 7730U) was beating the 5nm M1 on multi-threaded workloads and the HX 370 is well ahead of both on single-thread performance. Single-thread workloads aren't significantly power limited, so to not be the case the Zen5 HX 370 would have to be slower than the Zen3 7730U on threaded workloads at the same TDP, which seems unlikely. Again, would like a source on that. Please no Cinebench R23.
      - AnthonyMouse 2y ago
        7730U (7nm) vs. M1 (5nm) for MT: https://nanoreview.net/en/cpu-compare/apple-m1-vs-amd-ryzen-7-7730u https://nanoreview.net/en/cpu-compare/apple-m1-vs-amd-ryzen-... Faster in Passmark MT, basically tied in Geekbench MT, faster in average MT score. HX 370 vs. M1: https://nanoreview.net/en/cpu-compare/apple-m1-vs-amd-ryzen-ai-9-hx-370 https://nanoreview.net/en/cpu-compare/apple-m1-vs-amd-ryzen-... Faster in everything, ST and MT. ST difference is significant, MT difference is huge. Obviously this is expected because in this comparison AMD has the process advantage, but the expected thing is indeed what happens.
        aurareturn 2y ago
        Let's not use Passmark MT. Stick to the better benchmarks that are optimized for both ARM and x86. GB5 and GB6, M1 is faster in MT despite having 4 fewer cores. If you can find SPEC scores, that'd be great too. HX 370 vs M1, what's the perf/watt for SPEC and GB5/6 and Cinebench 2024? HX370 consumes a lot more power. Hence, there aren't any fanless laptops available for it. 4 years later, AMD's chips still can't work in a fanless laptop.
        AnthonyMouse 2y ago
        > Let's not use Passmark MT. Stick to the better benchmarks that are optimized for both ARM and x86. At some point you just run out of benchmarks. The majority of benchmarks people ordinarily use already don't run on Macs. > GB5 and GB6, M1 is faster in MT despite having 4 fewer cores. It has the same number of cores as the 7730U. Half the M1's cores are E-cores, but that should be an advantage on a comparison at a given power level because E-cores have better performance per watt. The M1 gets within the margin of error of the same MT score on the benchmark you actually like even though the M1 is built on a newer process. > HX 370 vs M1, what's the perf/watt for SPEC and GB5/6 and Cinebench 2024? You keep asking for benchmarks that probably nobody has published. > HX370 consumes a lot more power. Hence, there aren't any fanless laptops available for it. It has a configurable TDP down to 15W. You can make a laptop that passively dissipates 15W. But you can also make a laptop with a fan in it which is capable of higher performance from the same silicon and then have a setting for "silent mode" that lets you switch between them at will. People generally like that better so that's what they make.
- schmidtleonard 2y ago
  Is that the chip AMD just released? Isn't the M1 about 4 years old?
  - AnthonyMouse 2y ago
    The premise is that others can now use the same process as the M1 did to make fanless CPUs. Which they can, but they could always make fanless CPUs. The issue is that people also want them to be fast, which is not an absolute measurement fixed for all time, it's relative to competing contemporary systems with more cooling, which will always be faster.

ThatMedicIsASpy 2y ago

Don't run Windows and you don't need fast. Unfortunately Linux on notebooks is always a dice roll of random features (cam, fingerprint, ..) not working. There is a lot of older hardware running like crap because Windows just bloats up.

diffeomorphism 2y ago
So is running MacOS on non-apple laptops or running windows on chromebooks. Preinstalled is another story, of course, you paid someone to make sure all those random features work. That said, defaults seem often wrong and defaults matter. For instance, I recently got an HP Elitebook with an amd 7840hs because for some reason the _u version was tied to a lower res screen. By default it runs high powered and then the fan is loud enough to be annoying. Set it it to balanced or low power and the fan is inaudible.

MobiusHorizons 2y ago

I know everyone on this site loves to hate on soldered ram, but my impression is most people don’t understand that soldered ram is not the same thing as regular ram modules. They are literally different memory chips (LPDDR vs DDR) . When built to a specific chip my understanding is you can design for tighter timings and higher bandwidth which is important for the gpu. The M1 shipped with very fast LPDDR4X running at 4266MT/s which was even pretty fast by XMP desktop speeds at the time (2020). There are real engineering advantages to soldered ram especially if the memory controller has need designed with to take advantage of it. I guess it is similar to how gpu memory configurations are specialized and not modular.

ulyssys 2y ago
The objection to soldered RAM isn’t the RAM.
AnthonyMouse 2y ago
You're making two separate points here. The first is the timings, which is nominally real but it was never a huge difference. Moreover, the new CAMM standard aims to address this and basically does. The legacy SODIMM standard wasn't great and is essentially what caused this. The second is the bus width. If you use slotted memory and want a wide bus then you need at least one slot per channel and then you could end up needing a lot of slots. This isn't impossible -- servers do it -- but there is a cost attached to it. But this doesn't apply to systems that aren't using a wide bus. The base M3 has the same bus width as ordinary dual-channel PCs. The Pro has the equivalent of four channels or, for the newer generation, three. That's still not a crazy number in a high end system. With CAMM it would only be two modules, since the modules are each 128-bit. By way of comparison, Threadripper has four or eight channels and modern servers have dozens.