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 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.
> Apple Silicon is 2-4x more efficient than AMD and Intel CPUs during load while also having higher top end speed.
This is not true. For high-throughput server software x86 is significantly more efficient than Apple Silicon. Apple Silicon optimizes for idle states and x86 optimizes for throughput, which assumes very different use cases. One of the challenges for using x86 in laptops is that the microarchitectures are server-optimized at their heart.
ARM in general does not have the top-end performance of x86 if you are doing any kind of performance engineering. I don't think that is controversial. I'd still much rather have Apple Silicon in my laptop.
That said, Graviton is at least 50% of all AWS deployments now. So it's winning vs x86.
I think you'll have to define what top-end means and what performance engineering means.I dont think the point Amazon uses ARM was about performance but purely cost optimisation. At one point, nearly 40% of Intel's server revenue was coming from Amazon. They just figure it out at their scale it would be cheaper to do it themselves.
But I am purely guessing ARM has risen their price per core so it makes less financial sense to do a yearly update on CPU. They are also going into Server CPU business meaning they now have some incentives to keep it all to themselves. Which makes the Nvidia moves really smart as they decided to go for the ISA licences and do it by themselves.
> 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?
[0]https://www.notebookcheck.net/Dell-XPS-13-9350-laptop-review...
This is Cinebench 2025, a cross platform application: https://imgur.com/a/yvpEpKF
You sure like that table, don't you? Trying to find the source of that blender numbers, I came across many reddit posts of you with that exact same table. Sadly those also don't have a source - the are not from the notebookcheck source.
The reason why I keep reposting this table is because people post incorrect statements about AMD/Apple so often, often with zero data backing.
For Blender numbers, M4 Pro numbers came from Max Tech's review.[0] I don't remember where I got the Strix Halo numbers from. Could have been from another Youtube video or some old Notebookcheck article.
Anyway, Blender has official GPU benchmark numbers now:
M4 Pro: 2497 [1]
Strix Halo: 1304 [2]
So M4 Pro is roughly 90% faster in the latest Blender. The most likely reason for why Blender's official numbers favors M4 Pro even more is because of more recent optimizations.
Sources:
[0]https://youtu.be/0aLg_a9yrZk?si=NKcx3cl0NVdn4bwk&t=325
[1] https://opendata.blender.org/devices/Apple%20M4%20Pro%20(GPU...
[2] https://opendata.blender.org/devices/AMD%20Radeon%208060S%20...
Weren't we comparing CPUs though? Those Blender benchmarks are for GPUs.
Here is M4 Max CPU https://opendata.blender.org/devices/Apple%20M4%20Max/ - median score 475
Ryzen MAX+ PRO 395 shows median score 448 (can't link because the site does not seem to cope well with + or / in product names)
Resulting in M4 winning by 6%
Blender CPU tasks are highly parallel. AMD's Ryzen Max 395 has great MT performance. It's generally 5-20% slower in CPU MT than the M4 Max depending on the application.
> Weird because LNL achieved similar idle wattage as Apple Silicon.[0] Why do you say it's impossible?
And where is LNL now? How's the company that produced it? Even under Pat Gelsinger they said that LNL is a one off and they're not gonna make any more of them. It's commercially infeasible.
> Honestly not sure how your statement is relevant.
How is you bringing up synthetics relevant to race to idle?
Regardless, a number of things can be done on Strix Halo to improve the performance, first would be switching to some optimized Linux distro, or at least the kernel. That would claw back 5-20% depending on the task. It would also improve single core efficiency, I've seen my 7945hx drop from 14-15w idle on Windows to about 7-8 on Linux, because Windows likes to jerk off the CCDs non stop and throw the tasks around willy nilly which causes the second CCD and I/O die to never properly idle.