4 ms·

Where are all those people who for years (or since M1) were claiming that x86 is dead because ARM ISA (magically) offers significantly better energy-efficiency

Where are all those people who for years (or since M1) were claiming that x86 is dead because ARM ISA (magically) offers significantly better energy-efficiency than x86 ISA. Of course they ignored things like node advantage, but who cares? ;) Meanwhile industry veterans were claiming something different and turns out they were right https://chipsandcheese.com/2021/07/13/arm-or-x86-isa-doesnt-matter/ https://chipsandcheese.com/2021/07/13/arm-or-x86-isa-doesnt-... Asking which - x86 or ARM is faster/more energy eff is like asking which syntax (letters) is faster - syntax of Rust, Java or C++? And same as with CPUs - everything is up to the implementation - compiler, runtime/vm, libraries, etc.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
2OEH8eoCRo0 2y ago
It's early. Im sure they'll be here moving goalposts and cherry picking some new stat that's suddenly a deal breaker.
ceronman 2y ago
x86 is certainly not dead, and I don't think it will anytime soon, but they are still behind Apple M3 in terms of performance per watt. And M4 is about to arrive. I'm a bit disappointed because I really want more competition for Apple, but they're just not there yet, nor x86 nor Qualcomm.
- grues-dinner 2y ago
  Apple will also run into the diminishing returns, but they will retain the real killer advantage over general purpose CPU vendors that the have in other hardware areas: being able to retire or rework old or misconceived parts of the architecture entirely in future versions unilaterally. If they want to drop M1 support in some future MacOS version, all it will take will be a WWDC announcement that the next version won't simply work on that generation it earlier of machines.
  - adamc 2y ago
    Yeah, that all makes senses. But having legacy software that you support has been a big advantage for x86 for, basically, forever. For a lot of purposes, that is way more important than performance per watt.
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 2y ago
  I think they're running out of optimizations (hacks). They moved memory on package and bought the latest TSMC node. I guess they could keep buying the latest node but I don't expect any more large leaps.
- ac29 2y ago
  > x86 is certainly not dead, and I don't think it will anytime soon, but they are still behind Apple M3 in terms of performance per watt. Do you have a source for this? I havent seen a good review of Lunar Lake yet. The article this HN story links to is pretty bad.
TrainedMonkey 2y ago
I am going to observe that competition is good for consumers. However, using video playback for battery life / efficiency is sketchy as all modern chips have specialized hardware for video decoding. Interestingly Apple also uses video playback as a proxy for battery life... probably for the same make number go bigger reason.
senttoschool 2y ago
Actually, Apple's M3 and even Qualcomm's X Elite are significantly ahead of the new Intel chip in raw performance and especially perf/watt. Cinebench R24 ST[0]: * M3: 12.7 points/watt, 141 score * X Elite: 9.3 points/watt, 123 score * Intel Ultra 7 258V (new): 5.36 points/watt, 120 score * AMD HX 370: 3.74 points/watt, 116 score * AMD 8845HS: 3.1 points/watt, 102 score * Intel 155H: 3.1 points/watt, 102 score Cinebench R24 MT[0]: * M3: 28.3 points/watt, 598 score * X Elite: 22.6 points/watt, 1033 score * AMD HX 370: 19.7 points/watt, 1213 score * Intel Ultra 7 258V (new): 17.7 points/watt, 602 score * AMD 8845HS: 14.8 points/watt, 912 score * Intel 155H: 14.5 points/watt, 752 score PCMark did a battery life comparison using identical Dell XPS 13s[1]: * X Elite: 1,168 minutes, performance of 204,333 in Procyon Office * Intel Ultra 7 256V (new): 1,253 minutes, performance of 123,000 in Procyon Office * Meteor Lake 155H: 956 minutes, performance of 129,000 in Procyon Office Basically, Intel's new chip has 7% more battery life than X Elite but the X Elite is 66% faster while on battery. In other words, Intel's new chip throttles heavily to get that battery life. >Of course they ignored things like node advantage, but who cares? ;) Intel's new chip is using TSMC's N3B in the compute tile, same as M3 and better than X Elite's N4P. >Where are all those people who for years (or since M1) were claiming that x86 is dead because ARM ISA (magically) offers significantly better energy-efficiency than x86 ISA. I'm still here. ------ [0]Data for M3, X Elite, AMD, Meteor Lake taken from the best scores available here: 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... [0]Data for Core Ultra 7 taken from here: https://www.notebookcheck.net/Asus-Zenbook-S-14-UX5406-laptop-review-Excellent-everyday-laptop-with-Intel-Lunar-Lake.892978.0.html https://www.notebookcheck.net/Asus-Zenbook-S-14-UX5406-lapto... [1]https://youtu.be/QB1u4mjpBQI?si=0Wyf-sohY9ZytQYK&t=2648 https://youtu.be/QB1u4mjpBQI?si=0Wyf-sohY9ZytQYK&t=2648
- _yb2s 2y ago
  Am I interpreting this correctly- the M3 still uses only roughly half the power of this new Intel cpu discussed here?
  - senttoschool 2y ago
_yb2s 2y ago
I'm curious how this new chip actually compares in power consumption to the apple cpus. Certainly at the time, when I went from an x86 macbook to an M1, the ability to really work all day on fairly compute intensive stuff, e.g. on an airplane or park bench with no AC was revolutionary.
com2kid 2y ago
> is like asking which syntax (letters) is faster - syntax of Rust, Java or C++? This is actually a bad example because C style decls are provably, objectively, bad. They make parsing harder and once the types are non-trivial, they are absurdly hard to read and write. The case in point being non-trivial function pointers in C. The syntax for declaring a function pointer of a type that returns a function pointer is hidious. Meanwhile here is how you define a function in that returns a function that returns a string in a modern language (Typescript): type NumberToStringFunction = (num: number) => () => string; Compare that to C typedef char* (*(*NumberToStringFunction)(int))(void); > And same as with CPUs - everything is up to the implementation It is very easy to add CPU features that place a hard limit on performance. That is why Arm64 dropped all the conditional stuff! (Any instruction that limits the potential branch prediction is going to severely impact potential CPU performance.) History is littered with failed CPU architectures that just couldn't scale up, Intel's famous folly being Itanium. That said, x86 is mature and it dropped some of its less pleasant aspects with x64. Also IMHO drivers matter more for laptops than the CPU does. A bad driver keeping the GPU on w/o need or just not being able to enter the lower sleep states in general, will kill battery faster than anything else.
- chipdart 2y ago
  > This is actually a bad example because C style decls are provably, objectively, bad. I found your comment extremely funny. You singled out the language which is not only one of the most popular languages ever designed but also the one whose syntax inspired or was straight out cloned by the bulk of the world's most popular programming languages. Yes, the programming language defined in the 70s isn't perfect and has a couple of kinks that could be improved. As does every single programming language. But when you see a curly-bracket language you see programming language designers yelling to the world that C got way more things right than any other language not derived from C, which is the exact opposite of your unbelievable claim.
  - Dylan16807 2y ago
    > your unbelievable claim Please quote the specific claim you think is unbelievable. (I assume you don't mean the declarations claim because you didn't even disagree with it.)
superjan 2y ago
It annoys me too, especially when the explanation is: “because RISC simpler so it is faster, duh”. However x64 is at disadvantage for instruction decoding (it’s difficult to decode multiple variable length instructions in parallel), and secondly the guarantees for memory coherence across cores. Both come with an extra burden intel can’t eliminate for backward compatibility.
- baq 2y ago
  And this disadvantage quantified translates to… 0.1% area, performance, perf/watt, something else?
noncoml 2y ago
"is like asking which syntax (letters) is faster - syntax of Rust, Java or C++" Language syntax does affect the speed of the parser
- tester756 2y ago
  Correct, but I meant the performance of generated program.
  - noncoml 2y ago
    I got that, but it's not a good analogy. It's the parser that is to the language what the CPU is to the instruction set
    - tester756 2y ago
      I see your point, but isn't decoder part of implementation for ISA just like compiler, runtime/vm, stdlib and more... are for programming language?
      - noncoml 2y ago
        Yeah, I guess neither of them is a great analogy
h0l0cube 2y ago
> (or since M1) The bigger deal about the M-series performance and efficiency is SoC, not the ISA. This is something that could take off in the x86 world though it stifles upgradeability
- Wytwwww 2y ago
  This is a laptop chip, though. Upgradeability seems to be not a thing anymore at this point anyway (besides maybe an m2 slot or two). I don't think Lunar Lake even supports non-soldered memory even if the laptop manufacturer wanted to use DIMMs.
  - h0l0cube 2y ago
    I agree. It's getting more and more pointless to avoid SoC. No need to do expensive bus transports when you can just stay on-die. The only upgradeability that's needed is to swap out entire SoCs.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

2OEH8eoCRo0 2y ago

It's early. Im sure they'll be here moving goalposts and cherry picking some new stat that's suddenly a deal breaker.

ceronman 2y ago

x86 is certainly not dead, and I don't think it will anytime soon, but they are still behind Apple M3 in terms of performance per watt. And M4 is about to arrive. I'm a bit disappointed because I really want more competition for Apple, but they're just not there yet, nor x86 nor Qualcomm.

grues-dinner 2y ago
Apple will also run into the diminishing returns, but they will retain the real killer advantage over general purpose CPU vendors that the have in other hardware areas: being able to retire or rework old or misconceived parts of the architecture entirely in future versions unilaterally. If they want to drop M1 support in some future MacOS version, all it will take will be a WWDC announcement that the next version won't simply work on that generation it earlier of machines.
- adamc 2y ago
  Yeah, that all makes senses. But having legacy software that you support has been a big advantage for x86 for, basically, forever. For a lot of purposes, that is way more important than performance per watt.
2OEH8eoCRo0 2y ago
I think they're running out of optimizations (hacks). They moved memory on package and bought the latest TSMC node. I guess they could keep buying the latest node but I don't expect any more large leaps.
ac29 2y ago
> x86 is certainly not dead, and I don't think it will anytime soon, but they are still behind Apple M3 in terms of performance per watt. Do you have a source for this? I havent seen a good review of Lunar Lake yet. The article this HN story links to is pretty bad.

TrainedMonkey 2y ago

I am going to observe that competition is good for consumers. However, using video playback for battery life / efficiency is sketchy as all modern chips have specialized hardware for video decoding. Interestingly Apple also uses video playback as a proxy for battery life... probably for the same make number go bigger reason.

senttoschool 2y ago

Actually, Apple's M3 and even Qualcomm's X Elite are significantly ahead of the new Intel chip in raw performance and especially perf/watt. Cinebench R24 ST[0]: * M3: 12.7 points/watt, 141 score * X Elite: 9.3 points/watt, 123 score * Intel Ultra 7 258V (new): 5.36 points/watt, 120 score * AMD HX 370: 3.74 points/watt, 116 score * AMD 8845HS: 3.1 points/watt, 102 score * Intel 155H: 3.1 points/watt, 102 score Cinebench R24 MT[0]: * M3: 28.3 points/watt, 598 score * X Elite: 22.6 points/watt, 1033 score * AMD HX 370: 19.7 points/watt, 1213 score * Intel Ultra 7 258V (new): 17.7 points/watt, 602 score * AMD 8845HS: 14.8 points/watt, 912 score * Intel 155H: 14.5 points/watt, 752 score PCMark did a battery life comparison using identical Dell XPS 13s[1]: * X Elite: 1,168 minutes, performance of 204,333 in Procyon Office * Intel Ultra 7 256V (new): 1,253 minutes, performance of 123,000 in Procyon Office * Meteor Lake 155H: 956 minutes, performance of 129,000 in Procyon Office Basically, Intel's new chip has 7% more battery life than X Elite but the X Elite is 66% faster while on battery. In other words, Intel's new chip throttles heavily to get that battery life. >Of course they ignored things like node advantage, but who cares? ;) Intel's new chip is using TSMC's N3B in the compute tile, same as M3 and better than X Elite's N4P. >Where are all those people who for years (or since M1) were claiming that x86 is dead because ARM ISA (magically) offers significantly better energy-efficiency than x86 ISA. I'm still here. ------ [0]Data for M3, X Elite, AMD, Meteor Lake taken from the best scores available here: 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... [0]Data for Core Ultra 7 taken from here: https://www.notebookcheck.net/Asus-Zenbook-S-14-UX5406-laptop-review-Excellent-everyday-laptop-with-Intel-Lunar-Lake.892978.0.html https://www.notebookcheck.net/Asus-Zenbook-S-14-UX5406-lapto... [1]https://youtu.be/QB1u4mjpBQI?si=0Wyf-sohY9ZytQYK&t=2648 https://youtu.be/QB1u4mjpBQI?si=0Wyf-sohY9ZytQYK&t=2648

_yb2s 2y ago
Am I interpreting this correctly- the M3 still uses only roughly half the power of this new Intel cpu discussed here?
- senttoschool 2y ago

_yb2s 2y ago

I'm curious how this new chip actually compares in power consumption to the apple cpus. Certainly at the time, when I went from an x86 macbook to an M1, the ability to really work all day on fairly compute intensive stuff, e.g. on an airplane or park bench with no AC was revolutionary.

com2kid 2y ago

> is like asking which syntax (letters) is faster - syntax of Rust, Java or C++? This is actually a bad example because C style decls are provably, objectively, bad. They make parsing harder and once the types are non-trivial, they are absurdly hard to read and write. The case in point being non-trivial function pointers in C. The syntax for declaring a function pointer of a type that returns a function pointer is hidious. Meanwhile here is how you define a function in that returns a function that returns a string in a modern language (Typescript): type NumberToStringFunction = (num: number) => () => string; Compare that to C typedef char* (*(*NumberToStringFunction)(int))(void); > And same as with CPUs - everything is up to the implementation It is very easy to add CPU features that place a hard limit on performance. That is why Arm64 dropped all the conditional stuff! (Any instruction that limits the potential branch prediction is going to severely impact potential CPU performance.) History is littered with failed CPU architectures that just couldn't scale up, Intel's famous folly being Itanium. That said, x86 is mature and it dropped some of its less pleasant aspects with x64. Also IMHO drivers matter more for laptops than the CPU does. A bad driver keeping the GPU on w/o need or just not being able to enter the lower sleep states in general, will kill battery faster than anything else.

chipdart 2y ago
> This is actually a bad example because C style decls are provably, objectively, bad. I found your comment extremely funny. You singled out the language which is not only one of the most popular languages ever designed but also the one whose syntax inspired or was straight out cloned by the bulk of the world's most popular programming languages. Yes, the programming language defined in the 70s isn't perfect and has a couple of kinks that could be improved. As does every single programming language. But when you see a curly-bracket language you see programming language designers yelling to the world that C got way more things right than any other language not derived from C, which is the exact opposite of your unbelievable claim.
- Dylan16807 2y ago
  > your unbelievable claim Please quote the specific claim you think is unbelievable. (I assume you don't mean the declarations claim because you didn't even disagree with it.)

superjan 2y ago

It annoys me too, especially when the explanation is: “because RISC simpler so it is faster, duh”. However x64 is at disadvantage for instruction decoding (it’s difficult to decode multiple variable length instructions in parallel), and secondly the guarantees for memory coherence across cores. Both come with an extra burden intel can’t eliminate for backward compatibility.

baq 2y ago
And this disadvantage quantified translates to… 0.1% area, performance, perf/watt, something else?

noncoml 2y ago

"is like asking which syntax (letters) is faster - syntax of Rust, Java or C++" Language syntax does affect the speed of the parser

tester756 2y ago
Correct, but I meant the performance of generated program.
- noncoml 2y ago
  I got that, but it's not a good analogy. It's the parser that is to the language what the CPU is to the instruction set
  - tester756 2y ago
    I see your point, but isn't decoder part of implementation for ISA just like compiler, runtime/vm, stdlib and more... are for programming language?
    - noncoml 2y ago
      Yeah, I guess neither of them is a great analogy

h0l0cube 2y ago

> (or since M1) The bigger deal about the M-series performance and efficiency is SoC, not the ISA. This is something that could take off in the x86 world though it stifles upgradeability

Wytwwww 2y ago
This is a laptop chip, though. Upgradeability seems to be not a thing anymore at this point anyway (besides maybe an m2 slot or two). I don't think Lunar Lake even supports non-soldered memory even if the laptop manufacturer wanted to use DIMMs.
- h0l0cube 2y ago
  I agree. It's getting more and more pointless to avoid SoC. No need to do expensive bus transports when you can just stay on-die. The only upgradeability that's needed is to swap out entire SoCs.