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Battery efficiency comes from a million little optimizations in the technology stack, most of which comes down to using the CPU as little as possible. As such t

Battery efficiency comes from a million little optimizations in the technology stack, most of which comes down to using the CPU as little as possible. As such the instruction set architecture and process node aren't usually that important when it comes to your battery life. If you fully load the CPU and calculate how much energy a AI340 needs to perform a fixed workload and compare that to a M1 you'll probably find similar results, but that only matters for your battery life if you're doing things like blender renders, big compiles or gaming. Take for example this battery life gaming benchmark for an M1 Air: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jYSMfRKsmOU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jYSMfRKsmOU. 2.5 hours is about what you'd expect from an x86 laptop, possibly even worse than the fw13 you're comparing here. But turn down the settings so that the M1 CPU and GPU are mostly idle, and bam you get 10+ hours. Another example would be a ~5 year old mobile qualcomm chip. It's a worse process node than an AMD AI340, much much slower and significantly worse performance per watt, and yet it barely gets hot and sips power. All that to say: M1 is pretty fast, but the reason the battery life is better has to do with everything other than the CPU cores. That's what AMD and Intel are missing. > If I open too many tabs in Chrome I can feel the bottom of the laptop getting hot, open a YouTube video and the fans will often spin up. It's a fairly common issue on Linux to be missing hardware acceleration, especially for video decoding. I've had to enable gpu video decoding on my fw16 and haven't noticed the fans on youtube.

throwup238 1y ago
> All that to say: M1 is pretty fast, but the reason the battery life is better has to do with everything other than the CPU cores. That's what AMD and Intel are missing. A good demonstration is the Android kernel. By far the biggest difference between it and the stock Linux kernel is power management. Many subsystems down to the process scheduler are modified and tuned to improve battery life.
- qcnguy 1y ago
  And the more relevant case for laptops is macOS, which is heavily optimized for battery life and power draw in ways that Linux just isn't, neither is Windows. A lot of the problems here can't actually be fixed by intel, amd, or anyone designing x86 laptops because getting that level of efficiency requires the ability to strongly lead the app developer community. It also requires highly competent operating system developers focusing on the issue for a very long time, and being able to co-design the operating system, firmware and hardware together. Microsoft barely cares about Windows anymore, the Linux guys only care about servers since forever, and that leaves Apple alone in the market. I doubt anything will change anytime soon.
  - john01dav 1y ago
    Power efficiency is very important to servers too, for cost instead of for battery life. But, energy is energy. Thus, I suspect that the power draw is in userland systems that are specific to desktop, like desktop environments. Thus, using a simpler desktop environment may be worthwhile.
    - mcny 1y ago
      I used Ubuntu around 2015 - 2018 and got hit with a nasty defect around gnome online accounts integrations (please correct me if the words are wrong here). For some reason, it got stuck in a loop or a bad state on my machine. I have since then decided that I will never add any of my online accounts, Facebook, Google, or anything to Gnome.
    - qcnguy 1y ago
      It's important but not relative to performance. Perf/watt thinking has a much longer history in mobile and laptop spaces. Even in servers most workloads haven't migrated to ARM.
    - umbra07 1y ago
      I assumed the same thing, until I tested my hypothesis. KDE Plasma 6 uses less power on idle than just `Hyprland` (tiling WM) without anything like a notification daemon, idler, status bar, etc.
      - pdimitar 1y ago
        Were you able to find out why? This is very interesting and I'd never guess it.
  - deaddodo 1y ago
    If x86 just officially said “we’re cutting off 32-bit legacy” one day (similar to how Apple did), they could toss out 95% of the crap that makes them power inefficient. Just think of the difference dropping A10 offered for memory efficiency. “Modern Standby” could be made to actually work, ACPI states could be fixed, a functional wake-up state built anew, etc. Hell, while it would allow pared down CPUs, you could have a stop-gap where run mode was customized in firmware. Too much credit is given to Apple for “owning the stack” and too little attention to legacy x86 cruft that allows you to run classic Doom and Commander Keen on modern machines.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- stuaxo 1y ago
  It's a shame they are so bad at upstreaming stuff, and run on older kernels (which in turn makes upstreaming harder).
pzo 1y ago
> most of which comes down to using the CPU as little as possible. it least on mobile platform apple advocate the other way with race to sleep - do calculation as fast as you can with powerful cores so that whole chip can go back to sleep earlier and more often take naps.
- creshal 1y ago
  Intel stipulated the same under the name HUGI (Hurry Up and Go Idle) about 15 years ago when ultrabooks were the new hot thing. But when Apple says it, software devs actually listen.
  - redwall_hp 1y ago
    Apple was talking about batching tasks for battery life back when they shipped Grand Central Dispatch back in 2009. It was a major part of that year's WWDC keynote. Race to Zero was also a major part of how they designed networking for iOS.
  - int_19h 1y ago
    Peer pressure. When everybody else does it and you don't, your app sticks out like a sore thumb and makes users unhappy. The other aspect of it is that paid software is more prevalent in macOS land, and the prices are generally higher than on Windows. But the flip side of that is that user feedback is taken more seriously.
- nikanj 1y ago
  And then Microsoft adds an animated news tracker to the left corner of the start bar, making sure the cpu never gets to idle.
- ben-schaaf 1y ago
  Race to sleep is all about using the CPU as little as possible. Given that the modern AMD chips are faster than Apple M1 this clearly does not account for the disparity in battery life.
prmoustache 1y ago
> It's a fairly common issue on Linux to be missing hardware acceleration, especially for video decoding. To be fair, usually the linux itself has hardware acceleration available but the browser vendors tend to disable gpu rendering except on controlled/known perfectly working combinations of OS/Hardware/Drivers and they have much less testing in Linux. In most case you can force enabling gpu rendering in about:config and try it out yourself and leave it unless you get recurring crashes.
- deaddodo 1y ago
  The only browser I’ve ever had issues with enabling video acceleration on Linux is Firefox. All the Blink-based ones just work as long the proper libraries are installed and said libraries properly detect hardware support.
  - goneri 1y ago
    I run Fedora and for legal reasons, they ship a version that has this problem. Have you tried Mozilla's Flatpak build? I use it instead and it resolves all my problem.
  - int_19h 1y ago
    When I enabled HW acceleration on my Linux laptop to see how much it would improve battery life in Linux, my automated test (which is basically just browsing Reddit) would start crashing every 20 minutes or so.
sys_64738 1y ago
Sounds like death by (2^10)-24) cuts for the x86 architecture.
mayama 1y ago
I disable turbo boost in cpu on linux. Fans rarely start on the laptop and the system is generally cool. Even working on development and compilation I rarely need the extra perf. For my 10yr old laptop I cap max clock to 95% too to stop the fans from always starting. YMMV
- just6979 1y ago
  This is a big reason. Apple tunes their devices to not push the extreme edges of the performance that is possible, so they don't fall off that cliff of inefficiency. Combined with a really great perf/watt, they can run them at "90%" and stay nice and cool and sipping power (relatively), while most Intel/AMD machines are allowed to push their parts to "110%" much more often, which might give them a leg up in raw performance (for some workloads), but runs into the gross inefficiencies of pushing the envelope so that marginal performance increase takes 2-3x more power. If you manually go in and limit a modern Windows laptop's max performance to just under what the spec sheet indicates, it'll be fairly quiet and cool. In fact, most have a setting to do this, but it's rarely on by default because the manufacturers want to show off performance benchmarks. Of course, that's while also touting battery life that is not possible when in the mode that allows the best performance... This doesn't cover other stupid battery life eaters like Modern Standy (it's still possible to disable it with registry tweaks! do it!), but if you don't need absolute max perf for renders or compiling or whatever, put your Windows or Linux laptop into "cool & quiet" mode and enjoy some decent extra battery. It would also be really interesting to see what Apple Silicon could do under some Extreme OverClocking fun with sub-zero cooling or such. Would require a firmware & OS that allows more tuning and tweaking, so it's not going to happen anytime soon, but could actually be a nice brag for Apple it they did let it happen.
aurareturn 1y ago
All that to say: M1 is pretty fast, but the reason the battery life is better has to do with everything other than the CPU cores. That's what AMD and Intel are missing. This isn't true. Yes, uncore power consumption is very important but so is CPU load efficiency. The faster the CPU can finish a task, the faster it can go back to sleep, aka race to sleep. Apple Silicon is 2-4x more efficient than AMD and Intel CPUs during load while also having higher top end speed. Another thing that makes Apple laptops feel way more efficient is that they use a true big.Little design while AMD and Intel's little cores are actually designed for area efficiency and not power efficiency. In the case of Intel, they stuff as many little cores as possible to win MT benchmarks. In real world applications, the little cores are next to useless because most applications prefer a few fast cores over many slow cores.
- yaro330 1y ago
  > Apple Silicon is 2-4x more efficient than AMD and Intel CPUs during load while also having higher top end speed. This is false, in cross platform tasks it's on par if not worse than latest X86 arches. As others pointed out: 2.5h in gaming is about what you'd expect from a similarly built X86 machine. They are willing due to lower idle and low load consumption, which they achieve by integrating everything as much as possible - something that's basically impossible for AMD and Intel. > The faster the CPU can finish a task, the faster it can go back to sleep, aka race to sleep. May have been true when CPU manufacturers left a ton of headroom on the V/F curve, but not really true anymore. Zen 4 core's power draw shoots up sharply pass 4.6 GHz and nearly triples when you approach 5.5 GHz (compared to 4.6), are you gonna complete the task 3 times faster at 5.5 GHz?
  - aurareturn 1y ago
    This is false, in cross platform tasks it's on par if not worse than latest X86 arches. This is Cinebench 2024, a cross platform application: https://imgur.com/a/yvpEpKF https://imgur.com/a/yvpEpKF They are willing due to lower idle and low load consumption, which they achieve by integrating everything as much as possible - something that's basically impossible for AMD and Intel. Weird because LNL achieved similar idle wattage as Apple Silicon.[0] Why do you say it's impossible? May have been true when CPU manufacturers left a ton of headroom on the V/F curve, but not really true anymore. Zen 4 core's power draw shoots up sharply pass 4.6 GHz and nearly triples when you approach 5.5 GHz (compared to 4.6), are you gonna complete the task 3 times faster at 5.5 GHz? Honestly not sure how your statement is relevant. [0]https://www.notebookcheck.net/Dell-XPS-13-9350-laptop-review-Intel-Lunar-Lake-is-the-perfect-fit.911314.0.html https://www.notebookcheck.net/Dell-XPS-13-9350-laptop-review...
jonwinstanley 1y ago
A huge reason for the low power usage is the iPhone. Apple spent years incrementally improving efficiency and performance of their chips for phones. Intel and AMD were more desktop based so power efficiency wasnt the goal. When Apple's chips got so good they could transition into laptops, x86 wasn't in the same ballpark. Also the iPhone is the most lucrative product of all time (I think) and Apple poured a tonne of that money into R&D and taking the top engineers from Intel, AMD, and ARM, building one of the best silicon teams.
- RossBencina 1y ago
  I thought they just acquired P.A. Semi, job done.
  - lstodd 1y ago
    that was a part of it, yes. but do not forget how focused they (amd/intel, esp in opteron days -- edit) were on the server market.
  - simonh 1y ago
    When they bought PA Semi the company worked on IBM Power architecture chips. It was very much the team Apple was after, not any one particular technology.
- skeezyboy 1y ago
  > and Apple poured a tonne of that money into R&D and taking the top engineers from Intel, AMD, and ARM, building one of the best silicon teams. how much silicon did Apple actually create? I thought they outsourced all the components?
  - brokencode 1y ago
    Outsourced to who? The only companies with the engineers you’d need are the other CPU makers like Intel, AMD, Qualcomm, and Nvidia. And none of them make a CPU as efficient as Apple does.
lenkite 1y ago
Hell, Apple CPU's are even optimized for Apple software GC calls like Retain/Release objects. It seems if you want optimal performance and power efficiency, you need to own both hardware and software. Looks like general purpose CPUs are on the losing train. Maybe Intel should invent desktop+mobile OS and design bespoke chips for those.
- sabdaramadhan 1y ago
  > Maybe Intel should invent desktop+mobile OS and design bespoke chips for those. Intel is busy fixing up their shit after what happened with their 13 & 14th gen CPU. Making imagine they making OS its called IntelOS and the only thing you can run is only by using Intel CPU
- aurareturn 1y ago
  It seems if you want optimal performance and power efficiency, you need to own both hardware and software. Does Apple optimize the OS for its chips and vice versa? Yes. However, Apple Silicon hardware is just that good and that far ahead of x86. Here's an M4 Max running macOS running Parallels running Windows when compared to the fastest AMD laptop chip: https://browser.geekbench.com/v6/cpu/compare/13494385?baseline=13494130 https://browser.geekbench.com/v6/cpu/compare/13494385?baseli... M4 Max is still faster even with 14 out of 16 possible cores being used. You can't chalk that up to optimizations anymore because Windows has no Apple Silicon optimizations.
  - lenkite 1y ago
    Not really sure whether it makes a difference, but the Parallel VM is running Windows Pro, while the Windows OS on ASUS Gaming Laptop is running Windows Home.
    - sabdaramadhan 1y ago
      Isn't most gaming laptops had Home Singe Language built in? (never had a gaming laptop before)
whatevaa 1y ago
Turning down the settings will get you worse experiece, especially if you turn down that they are "mostly idle". Not comparable.
mrtksn 1y ago
Which also should mean that using that M1 machine with Linux will have Intel/AMD like experience, not the M1 with macOS experience.
- ben-schaaf 1y ago
  Yes and no. The optimizations made for battery life are a combination of software and hardware. You'll get bad battery life on an M1 with Linux when watching youtube without hardware acceleration, but if you're just idling (and if Linux idles properly) then it should be similar to macOS.
rollcat 1y ago
> It's a fairly common issue on Linux to be missing hardware acceleration, especially for video decoding. I've had to enable gpu video decoding on my fw16 and haven't noticed the fans on youtube. I've worked in video delivery for quite a while. If I were to write the law, decision-makers wilfully forcing software video decoding where hardware is available would be made to sit on these CPUs with their bare buttocks. If that sounds inhumane, then yes, this is the harm they're bringing upon their users, and maybe it's time to stop turning the other cheek.
- throwawaylaptop 1y ago
  I run Linux Mint Mate on a 10 year old laptop. Everything works fine, but watching YouTube makes my wireless USB dongle mouse stutter a LOT. Basically if CPU usage goes up, mouse goes to hell. Are you telling me that for some reason it's not using any hardware acceleration available while watching YouTube? How do I fix it?
  - dismalaf 1y ago
    Easiest way is to use Chrome or a Chrome based browser since they bundle codecs with the browser. If you're using Firefox, need to make sure you have the codecs. I know nothing about Mint specifically though to know if they'd automatically install codecs or not.
    - lights0123 1y ago
      You specifically don't want to use the bundled codecs since those would be CPU decode only.
      - throwawaylaptop 1y ago
        Interesting. I'll look into that more.
      - dismalaf 1y ago
        Straight up false. I have both Chrome and Vivaldi installed on Linux, both have hardware video decoding on OOTB... You check it by putting chrome://gpu in the address bar.
ToucanLoucan 1y ago
I honestly don't see myself ever leaving Macbooks at this point. It's the whole package: the battery life is insane, I've literally never had a dead laptop when I needed it no matter what I'm doing or where I'm at; it runs circles around every other computer I own, save for my beastly gaming PC; the stability and consistency of MacOS, and the underlying unix arch for a lot of tooling, all the way down to the build quality being damn near flawless save for the annoying lack of ports (though increasingly, I find myself needing ports less and less). Like, would I prefer an older-style Macbook overall, with an integrated card reader, HDMI port, ethernet jack, all that? Yeah, sure. But to get that now I have to go to a PC laptop and there's so many compromises there. The battery life isn't even in the same zip code as a Mac, they're much heavier, the chips run hot even just doing web browsing let alone any actual work, and they CREAK. Like my god I don't remember the last time I had a Windows laptop open and it wasn't making all manner of creaks and groans and squeaks. The last one would be solved I guess if you went for something super high end, or at least I hope it would be, but I dunno if I'm dropping $3k+ either way I'd just as soon stay with the Macbook.
- solardev 1y ago
  Even the high end ones (Razers, Asus, Surface Books, Lenovos) are mere lookalikes and don't run anywhere as well as the MacBooks. They're hot and heavy and loud and full of driver issues and discrete graphics switching headaches and of course the endless ads and AI spam of modern Windows. No comparison at all...
- AlexandrB 1y ago
  > Like, would I prefer an older-style Macbook overall, with an integrated card reader, HDMI port, ethernet jack, all that? Yeah, sure. Modern MacBook pros have 2/3 (card reader and HDMI port), and they brought back my beloved MagSafe charging.
  - ToucanLoucan 1y ago
    No shit! I'm still rocking the M1 Pro for personal and the M2 Air for work so I do have magsafe back for one of them at least, but just USB-C besides that. But yeah IMHO there's just no comparison. Unless you're one of those folks who simply cannot fucking stand Mac, it's just no contest.
koala_man 1y ago
I once saw a high resolution CPU graph of a video playing in Safari. It was completely dead except for a blip every 1/30th of a second. Incredible discipline. The Chrome graph in comparison was a mess.
- novok 1y ago
  Safari team explicitly targets perf as a target. I just wish they weren't so bad about extensions and adblock and I'd use it as my daily driver. But those paper cuts make me go back to chromium browsers all the time.
  - impure-aqua 1y ago
    I find Orion has similar power efficiency but avoids those papercuts: https://kagi.com/orion/ https://kagi.com/orion/
RajT88 1y ago
> All that to say: M1 is pretty fast, but the reason the battery life is better has to do with everything other than the CPU cores. That's what AMD and Intel are missing. Apple is vertically integrated and can optimize at the OS and for many applications they ship with the device. Compare that to how many cooks are in the kitchen in Wintel land. Perfect example is trying to get to the bottom of why your windows laptop won't go to sleep and cooks itself in your backpack. Unless something's changed, last I checked it was a circular firing squad between laptop manufacturer, Microsoft and various hardware vendors all blaming each other.
- amazingman 1y ago
  I remember a time when this was supposed to be Wintel's advantage. It's really strange to now be in a time where Apple leads the consumer computing industry in hardware performance, yet is utterly failing at evolving the actual experience of using their computers. I'm pretty sure I'm not the only one who would gladly give up a bit of performance if it were going to result in a polished, consistent UI/UX based on the actual science of human interface design rather than this usability hellscape the Alan Dye era is sending us into.
- bitwize 1y ago
  Microsoft is pushing "Modern Standby" over actual sleep, so laptops can download and install updates while closed at night.
  - reaperducer 1y ago
    Microsoft is pushing "Modern Standby" over actual sleep, so laptops can download and install updates while closed at night. Apple has this. It's called Power Nap. But for some reason, it doesn't cause the same problems reported by people here on HN.
    - bitwize 1y ago
      It doesn't cause the same problems because Apple's Power Nap is something you have to enable. It's an option for users who find it useful. It's not replacing traditional S3 sleep, wherein virtually everything is unpowered except a trickle to keep the RAM alive. Microsoft is supplanting traditional sleep with Modern Standby. You can disable Modern Standby, but only with registry jiggery-pokery, and Microsoft is pressuring OEMs to remove S3 support altogether.

throwup238 1y ago

> All that to say: M1 is pretty fast, but the reason the battery life is better has to do with everything other than the CPU cores. That's what AMD and Intel are missing. A good demonstration is the Android kernel. By far the biggest difference between it and the stock Linux kernel is power management. Many subsystems down to the process scheduler are modified and tuned to improve battery life.

qcnguy 1y ago
And the more relevant case for laptops is macOS, which is heavily optimized for battery life and power draw in ways that Linux just isn't, neither is Windows. A lot of the problems here can't actually be fixed by intel, amd, or anyone designing x86 laptops because getting that level of efficiency requires the ability to strongly lead the app developer community. It also requires highly competent operating system developers focusing on the issue for a very long time, and being able to co-design the operating system, firmware and hardware together. Microsoft barely cares about Windows anymore, the Linux guys only care about servers since forever, and that leaves Apple alone in the market. I doubt anything will change anytime soon.
- john01dav 1y ago
  Power efficiency is very important to servers too, for cost instead of for battery life. But, energy is energy. Thus, I suspect that the power draw is in userland systems that are specific to desktop, like desktop environments. Thus, using a simpler desktop environment may be worthwhile.
  - mcny 1y ago
    I used Ubuntu around 2015 - 2018 and got hit with a nasty defect around gnome online accounts integrations (please correct me if the words are wrong here). For some reason, it got stuck in a loop or a bad state on my machine. I have since then decided that I will never add any of my online accounts, Facebook, Google, or anything to Gnome.
  - qcnguy 1y ago
    It's important but not relative to performance. Perf/watt thinking has a much longer history in mobile and laptop spaces. Even in servers most workloads haven't migrated to ARM.
  - umbra07 1y ago
    I assumed the same thing, until I tested my hypothesis. KDE Plasma 6 uses less power on idle than just `Hyprland` (tiling WM) without anything like a notification daemon, idler, status bar, etc.
    - pdimitar 1y ago
      Were you able to find out why? This is very interesting and I'd never guess it.
- deaddodo 1y ago
  If x86 just officially said “we’re cutting off 32-bit legacy” one day (similar to how Apple did), they could toss out 95% of the crap that makes them power inefficient. Just think of the difference dropping A10 offered for memory efficiency. “Modern Standby” could be made to actually work, ACPI states could be fixed, a functional wake-up state built anew, etc. Hell, while it would allow pared down CPUs, you could have a stop-gap where run mode was customized in firmware. Too much credit is given to Apple for “owning the stack” and too little attention to legacy x86 cruft that allows you to run classic Doom and Commander Keen on modern machines.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
stuaxo 1y ago
It's a shame they are so bad at upstreaming stuff, and run on older kernels (which in turn makes upstreaming harder).

pzo 1y ago

> most of which comes down to using the CPU as little as possible. it least on mobile platform apple advocate the other way with race to sleep - do calculation as fast as you can with powerful cores so that whole chip can go back to sleep earlier and more often take naps.

creshal 1y ago
Intel stipulated the same under the name HUGI (Hurry Up and Go Idle) about 15 years ago when ultrabooks were the new hot thing. But when Apple says it, software devs actually listen.
- redwall_hp 1y ago
  Apple was talking about batching tasks for battery life back when they shipped Grand Central Dispatch back in 2009. It was a major part of that year's WWDC keynote. Race to Zero was also a major part of how they designed networking for iOS.
- int_19h 1y ago
  Peer pressure. When everybody else does it and you don't, your app sticks out like a sore thumb and makes users unhappy. The other aspect of it is that paid software is more prevalent in macOS land, and the prices are generally higher than on Windows. But the flip side of that is that user feedback is taken more seriously.
nikanj 1y ago
And then Microsoft adds an animated news tracker to the left corner of the start bar, making sure the cpu never gets to idle.
ben-schaaf 1y ago
Race to sleep is all about using the CPU as little as possible. Given that the modern AMD chips are faster than Apple M1 this clearly does not account for the disparity in battery life.

prmoustache 1y ago

> It's a fairly common issue on Linux to be missing hardware acceleration, especially for video decoding. To be fair, usually the linux itself has hardware acceleration available but the browser vendors tend to disable gpu rendering except on controlled/known perfectly working combinations of OS/Hardware/Drivers and they have much less testing in Linux. In most case you can force enabling gpu rendering in about:config and try it out yourself and leave it unless you get recurring crashes.

deaddodo 1y ago
The only browser I’ve ever had issues with enabling video acceleration on Linux is Firefox. All the Blink-based ones just work as long the proper libraries are installed and said libraries properly detect hardware support.
- goneri 1y ago
  I run Fedora and for legal reasons, they ship a version that has this problem. Have you tried Mozilla's Flatpak build? I use it instead and it resolves all my problem.
- int_19h 1y ago
  When I enabled HW acceleration on my Linux laptop to see how much it would improve battery life in Linux, my automated test (which is basically just browsing Reddit) would start crashing every 20 minutes or so.

sys_64738 1y ago

Sounds like death by (2^10)-24) cuts for the x86 architecture.

mayama 1y ago

I disable turbo boost in cpu on linux. Fans rarely start on the laptop and the system is generally cool. Even working on development and compilation I rarely need the extra perf. For my 10yr old laptop I cap max clock to 95% too to stop the fans from always starting. YMMV

just6979 1y ago
This is a big reason. Apple tunes their devices to not push the extreme edges of the performance that is possible, so they don't fall off that cliff of inefficiency. Combined with a really great perf/watt, they can run them at "90%" and stay nice and cool and sipping power (relatively), while most Intel/AMD machines are allowed to push their parts to "110%" much more often, which might give them a leg up in raw performance (for some workloads), but runs into the gross inefficiencies of pushing the envelope so that marginal performance increase takes 2-3x more power. If you manually go in and limit a modern Windows laptop's max performance to just under what the spec sheet indicates, it'll be fairly quiet and cool. In fact, most have a setting to do this, but it's rarely on by default because the manufacturers want to show off performance benchmarks. Of course, that's while also touting battery life that is not possible when in the mode that allows the best performance... This doesn't cover other stupid battery life eaters like Modern Standy (it's still possible to disable it with registry tweaks! do it!), but if you don't need absolute max perf for renders or compiling or whatever, put your Windows or Linux laptop into "cool & quiet" mode and enjoy some decent extra battery. It would also be really interesting to see what Apple Silicon could do under some Extreme OverClocking fun with sub-zero cooling or such. Would require a firmware & OS that allows more tuning and tweaking, so it's not going to happen anytime soon, but could actually be a nice brag for Apple it they did let it happen.

aurareturn 1y ago

All that to say: M1 is pretty fast, but the reason the battery life is better has to do with everything other than the CPU cores. That's what AMD and Intel are missing. This isn't true. Yes, uncore power consumption is very important but so is CPU load efficiency. The faster the CPU can finish a task, the faster it can go back to sleep, aka race to sleep. Apple Silicon is 2-4x more efficient than AMD and Intel CPUs during load while also having higher top end speed. Another thing that makes Apple laptops feel way more efficient is that they use a true big.Little design while AMD and Intel's little cores are actually designed for area efficiency and not power efficiency. In the case of Intel, they stuff as many little cores as possible to win MT benchmarks. In real world applications, the little cores are next to useless because most applications prefer a few fast cores over many slow cores.

yaro330 1y ago
> Apple Silicon is 2-4x more efficient than AMD and Intel CPUs during load while also having higher top end speed. This is false, in cross platform tasks it's on par if not worse than latest X86 arches. As others pointed out: 2.5h in gaming is about what you'd expect from a similarly built X86 machine. They are willing due to lower idle and low load consumption, which they achieve by integrating everything as much as possible - something that's basically impossible for AMD and Intel. > The faster the CPU can finish a task, the faster it can go back to sleep, aka race to sleep. May have been true when CPU manufacturers left a ton of headroom on the V/F curve, but not really true anymore. Zen 4 core's power draw shoots up sharply pass 4.6 GHz and nearly triples when you approach 5.5 GHz (compared to 4.6), are you gonna complete the task 3 times faster at 5.5 GHz?
- aurareturn 1y ago
  This is false, in cross platform tasks it's on par if not worse than latest X86 arches. This is Cinebench 2024, a cross platform application: https://imgur.com/a/yvpEpKF https://imgur.com/a/yvpEpKF They are willing due to lower idle and low load consumption, which they achieve by integrating everything as much as possible - something that's basically impossible for AMD and Intel. Weird because LNL achieved similar idle wattage as Apple Silicon.[0] Why do you say it's impossible? May have been true when CPU manufacturers left a ton of headroom on the V/F curve, but not really true anymore. Zen 4 core's power draw shoots up sharply pass 4.6 GHz and nearly triples when you approach 5.5 GHz (compared to 4.6), are you gonna complete the task 3 times faster at 5.5 GHz? Honestly not sure how your statement is relevant. [0]https://www.notebookcheck.net/Dell-XPS-13-9350-laptop-review-Intel-Lunar-Lake-is-the-perfect-fit.911314.0.html https://www.notebookcheck.net/Dell-XPS-13-9350-laptop-review...

jonwinstanley 1y ago

A huge reason for the low power usage is the iPhone. Apple spent years incrementally improving efficiency and performance of their chips for phones. Intel and AMD were more desktop based so power efficiency wasnt the goal. When Apple's chips got so good they could transition into laptops, x86 wasn't in the same ballpark. Also the iPhone is the most lucrative product of all time (I think) and Apple poured a tonne of that money into R&D and taking the top engineers from Intel, AMD, and ARM, building one of the best silicon teams.

RossBencina 1y ago
I thought they just acquired P.A. Semi, job done.
- lstodd 1y ago
  that was a part of it, yes. but do not forget how focused they (amd/intel, esp in opteron days -- edit) were on the server market.
- simonh 1y ago
  When they bought PA Semi the company worked on IBM Power architecture chips. It was very much the team Apple was after, not any one particular technology.
skeezyboy 1y ago
> and Apple poured a tonne of that money into R&D and taking the top engineers from Intel, AMD, and ARM, building one of the best silicon teams. how much silicon did Apple actually create? I thought they outsourced all the components?
- brokencode 1y ago
  Outsourced to who? The only companies with the engineers you’d need are the other CPU makers like Intel, AMD, Qualcomm, and Nvidia. And none of them make a CPU as efficient as Apple does.

lenkite 1y ago

Hell, Apple CPU's are even optimized for Apple software GC calls like Retain/Release objects. It seems if you want optimal performance and power efficiency, you need to own both hardware and software. Looks like general purpose CPUs are on the losing train. Maybe Intel should invent desktop+mobile OS and design bespoke chips for those.

sabdaramadhan 1y ago
> Maybe Intel should invent desktop+mobile OS and design bespoke chips for those. Intel is busy fixing up their shit after what happened with their 13 & 14th gen CPU. Making imagine they making OS its called IntelOS and the only thing you can run is only by using Intel CPU
aurareturn 1y ago
It seems if you want optimal performance and power efficiency, you need to own both hardware and software. Does Apple optimize the OS for its chips and vice versa? Yes. However, Apple Silicon hardware is just that good and that far ahead of x86. Here's an M4 Max running macOS running Parallels running Windows when compared to the fastest AMD laptop chip: https://browser.geekbench.com/v6/cpu/compare/13494385?baseline=13494130 https://browser.geekbench.com/v6/cpu/compare/13494385?baseli... M4 Max is still faster even with 14 out of 16 possible cores being used. You can't chalk that up to optimizations anymore because Windows has no Apple Silicon optimizations.
- lenkite 1y ago
  Not really sure whether it makes a difference, but the Parallel VM is running Windows Pro, while the Windows OS on ASUS Gaming Laptop is running Windows Home.
  - sabdaramadhan 1y ago
    Isn't most gaming laptops had Home Singe Language built in? (never had a gaming laptop before)

whatevaa 1y ago

Turning down the settings will get you worse experiece, especially if you turn down that they are "mostly idle". Not comparable.

mrtksn 1y ago

Which also should mean that using that M1 machine with Linux will have Intel/AMD like experience, not the M1 with macOS experience.

ben-schaaf 1y ago
Yes and no. The optimizations made for battery life are a combination of software and hardware. You'll get bad battery life on an M1 with Linux when watching youtube without hardware acceleration, but if you're just idling (and if Linux idles properly) then it should be similar to macOS.

rollcat 1y ago

> It's a fairly common issue on Linux to be missing hardware acceleration, especially for video decoding. I've had to enable gpu video decoding on my fw16 and haven't noticed the fans on youtube. I've worked in video delivery for quite a while. If I were to write the law, decision-makers wilfully forcing software video decoding where hardware is available would be made to sit on these CPUs with their bare buttocks. If that sounds inhumane, then yes, this is the harm they're bringing upon their users, and maybe it's time to stop turning the other cheek.

throwawaylaptop 1y ago
I run Linux Mint Mate on a 10 year old laptop. Everything works fine, but watching YouTube makes my wireless USB dongle mouse stutter a LOT. Basically if CPU usage goes up, mouse goes to hell. Are you telling me that for some reason it's not using any hardware acceleration available while watching YouTube? How do I fix it?
- dismalaf 1y ago
  Easiest way is to use Chrome or a Chrome based browser since they bundle codecs with the browser. If you're using Firefox, need to make sure you have the codecs. I know nothing about Mint specifically though to know if they'd automatically install codecs or not.
  - lights0123 1y ago
    You specifically don't want to use the bundled codecs since those would be CPU decode only.
    - throwawaylaptop 1y ago
      Interesting. I'll look into that more.
    - dismalaf 1y ago
      Straight up false. I have both Chrome and Vivaldi installed on Linux, both have hardware video decoding on OOTB... You check it by putting chrome://gpu in the address bar.

ToucanLoucan 1y ago

I honestly don't see myself ever leaving Macbooks at this point. It's the whole package: the battery life is insane, I've literally never had a dead laptop when I needed it no matter what I'm doing or where I'm at; it runs circles around every other computer I own, save for my beastly gaming PC; the stability and consistency of MacOS, and the underlying unix arch for a lot of tooling, all the way down to the build quality being damn near flawless save for the annoying lack of ports (though increasingly, I find myself needing ports less and less). Like, would I prefer an older-style Macbook overall, with an integrated card reader, HDMI port, ethernet jack, all that? Yeah, sure. But to get that now I have to go to a PC laptop and there's so many compromises there. The battery life isn't even in the same zip code as a Mac, they're much heavier, the chips run hot even just doing web browsing let alone any actual work, and they CREAK. Like my god I don't remember the last time I had a Windows laptop open and it wasn't making all manner of creaks and groans and squeaks. The last one would be solved I guess if you went for something super high end, or at least I hope it would be, but I dunno if I'm dropping $3k+ either way I'd just as soon stay with the Macbook.

solardev 1y ago
Even the high end ones (Razers, Asus, Surface Books, Lenovos) are mere lookalikes and don't run anywhere as well as the MacBooks. They're hot and heavy and loud and full of driver issues and discrete graphics switching headaches and of course the endless ads and AI spam of modern Windows. No comparison at all...
AlexandrB 1y ago
> Like, would I prefer an older-style Macbook overall, with an integrated card reader, HDMI port, ethernet jack, all that? Yeah, sure. Modern MacBook pros have 2/3 (card reader and HDMI port), and they brought back my beloved MagSafe charging.
- ToucanLoucan 1y ago
  No shit! I'm still rocking the M1 Pro for personal and the M2 Air for work so I do have magsafe back for one of them at least, but just USB-C besides that. But yeah IMHO there's just no comparison. Unless you're one of those folks who simply cannot fucking stand Mac, it's just no contest.

koala_man 1y ago

I once saw a high resolution CPU graph of a video playing in Safari. It was completely dead except for a blip every 1/30th of a second. Incredible discipline. The Chrome graph in comparison was a mess.

novok 1y ago
Safari team explicitly targets perf as a target. I just wish they weren't so bad about extensions and adblock and I'd use it as my daily driver. But those paper cuts make me go back to chromium browsers all the time.
- impure-aqua 1y ago
  I find Orion has similar power efficiency but avoids those papercuts: https://kagi.com/orion/ https://kagi.com/orion/

RajT88 1y ago

> All that to say: M1 is pretty fast, but the reason the battery life is better has to do with everything other than the CPU cores. That's what AMD and Intel are missing. Apple is vertically integrated and can optimize at the OS and for many applications they ship with the device. Compare that to how many cooks are in the kitchen in Wintel land. Perfect example is trying to get to the bottom of why your windows laptop won't go to sleep and cooks itself in your backpack. Unless something's changed, last I checked it was a circular firing squad between laptop manufacturer, Microsoft and various hardware vendors all blaming each other.

amazingman 1y ago
I remember a time when this was supposed to be Wintel's advantage. It's really strange to now be in a time where Apple leads the consumer computing industry in hardware performance, yet is utterly failing at evolving the actual experience of using their computers. I'm pretty sure I'm not the only one who would gladly give up a bit of performance if it were going to result in a polished, consistent UI/UX based on the actual science of human interface design rather than this usability hellscape the Alan Dye era is sending us into.
bitwize 1y ago
Microsoft is pushing "Modern Standby" over actual sleep, so laptops can download and install updates while closed at night.
- reaperducer 1y ago
  Microsoft is pushing "Modern Standby" over actual sleep, so laptops can download and install updates while closed at night. Apple has this. It's called Power Nap. But for some reason, it doesn't cause the same problems reported by people here on HN.
  - bitwize 1y ago
    It doesn't cause the same problems because Apple's Power Nap is something you have to enable. It's an option for users who find it useful. It's not replacing traditional S3 sleep, wherein virtually everything is unpowered except a trickle to keep the RAM alive. Microsoft is supplanting traditional sleep with Modern Standby. You can disable Modern Standby, but only with registry jiggery-pokery, and Microsoft is pressuring OEMs to remove S3 support altogether.