Yes they are, but only one of those is at all affected by the choice of ISA. If modern AMD chips are better at race-to-sleep than an Apple M1 and still get worse battery life then the problem is clearly not x86-64.

No, and that's exactly the point I'm making. If you try to measure ISA efficiency using a workload where the CPU is idle the vast majority of the time, then your power usage will be dominated by things unrelated to the ISA.

To further hammer the point home, let me reduce do a reductio ad absurdum: The chip is still "in use" when its asleep. Sleeping your laptop is a typical usecase. Therefore how much power is used while sleeping is a good measure of ISA efficiency. This is of course absurd because the CPU cores are entirely turned off when sleeping, they could draw 1kW with potato performance and nothing in this measurement would change.

> The latest AMD under full load uses the same power as M1 and is faster, thus it has better performance per watt.

He also said per watt. An AMD CPU running at full power and then stopping will use less battery than an M1 with the same task; that's comparing power efficiency.

It's not, because Apple purposefully lied on their marketing material. Letting a 3090 go on full blast brings it pretty much in line in perf/watt. Your 3090 will not massively thermal throttle after 30 minutes either, but the M1 Ultra will.

So, yes, if you want to look good on pointless benchmarks, a M1 ultra ran for 1 minute is more efficient than a downclocked 3090.

The OS matters, and I would guess you were using two different OSes? I have no doubt macOS running on an m1 is more optimized than whatever you were using on the ryzen.

I recently had to remove Windows completely from a few years old laptop with an 12th gen cpu and a Intel Iris / GeForce RTX 3060 Mobile combo because it was running very hot (90c+) and the fans were constantly running. Running Linux, I have no issues. I just double checked since I had not for several months, and temperature is 40c lower on my lap than it was propped up on a book for maximum airflow. Full disclaimer, I would have done this anyways, but the process was sped up because my wife was extremely annoyed with the noise my new-to-me computer was making, and it was cooking the components.

I have learned to start with the OS when things are tangibly off, and only eventually come back to point the finger at my hardware.

If we're comparing entire systems as products you're absolutely right. That's not what this discussion is about. We're trying to compare the efficiency of the ISA. What do you think would happen if AMD replaced the x86-64 decoders with ARM64 ones, and changed nothing about how the CPU idles, how high it clocks or how fast it boosts?

My guess is ARM64 is a few percent more efficient, something AMD has claimed in the past. They're now saying it would be identical, which is probably not far from the truth.

The simple fact of the matter is that the ISA is only a small part of how long your battery lasts. If you're gaming or rendering or compiling it's going to matter a lot, and Apple battery life is pretty comparable in these scenarios. If you're reading, writing, browsing or watching then your cores are going to be mostly idle, so the only thing the ISA influences won't even have a current running through it.

If you take a peak-performance-optimized design (the Intel CPU) and throttle it down to low power levels, it will be slower than a design optimized for low power (the Apple CPU).

"let's compare oranges to oranges"

That's impossible because Apple has bought up most of TSMC's 3nm production capacity. You could try to approximate by comparing Apple M4 Max against NVIDIA B300 but that'll be a very one-sided win for NVIDIA.

> Can you explain then, how come switching from Intel MBP to Apple Silicon MBP feels like literally everything is 3x faster, the laptop barely heats up at peak load, and you never hear the fans? Going back to my Intel MBP is like going back to stone age computing.

My understanding of it is that Apple Silicon's very very long instruction pipeline plays well with how the software stack in MacOS is written and compiled first and foremost.

Similarly that the same applications take less RAM in MacOS than even in Linux often even because at the OS level stuff like garbage collection are better integrated.

I did not say "Intel is so good". I said "x86 peak single-thread performance is just a hair better than Apple M-series peak".

Pretty much everything else about the M-series parts is better. In particular, Apple's uncore is amazing (partly because it's a lot newer design) and you really notice that in terms of power management.

Is the Intel MacBook very old?

Is it possible that your workloads are bound by something other than single-threaded compute performance? Memory? Drive speed?

Is it possible that Apple did a better job tuning their OS for their hardware, than for Intel’s?

it all comes down to thermal budget of something as thin as MBP.

It seems impossible that CPUs could ever catch up to GPUs, for the things that GPUs are really good at.

I dunno. I sort of like all the vector extensions we’ve gotten on the CPU side as they chase that dream. But I do wonder if Intel would have been better off just monomaniacally focusing on single-threaded performance, with the expectation that their chips should double down on their strength, rather than trying to attack where Nvidia is strong.

Memory bandwidth is an uncore thing, not a core thing. Apple's uncore is amazing. But that means they can feed their cores well, not that their cores are actually the absolute best performers when all the stops are pulled out.

I mean, huge software with a ton of quirks like a AAA video game are arguably not a good benchmark to understand hardware.

They're still good benchmarks IMO because they represent a "real workload" but to understand why the 9800X3D performs this much better you'd want some metrics on CPU cache misses in the processors tested.

It's often similar to hyperthreading -- on very efficient sofware you actually want to turn SMT off sometimes because it causes too many cache evictions as two threads fight for the same L2 cache space which is efficiently utilized.

So software having a huge speedup from a X3D model with a ton of cache might indicate the sofware has a bad data layout and needs the huge cache because it keeps doing RAM round trips. You'd presumably also see large speedups in this case from faster RAM on the same processor.

I mean at 2GHz, and 2/3c, the signal travels about 10cm in 1 clock cycle. So it's not negligible, but I suspect it has much more to do with signal integrity and the transmission line characteristics of the data bus.

I think since on mobile CPUs, the RAM sits right on top of the SoC, very likely the CPUs are designed with a low RAM latency in mind.

> It's like comparing an F150 with a Ferrari, a decision that no buyer needs to make.

... maybe a Prius? Bruh.

The question remains: Why would they spend billions only to "catch up"? That means, even after the investment is made and they have a product that is just as good, there is still no compelling technical reason for the customer to buy Intel/AMD over the other alternatives that are just as good, so their only possible avenue to attract customers is to drive the price into the ground which is a losing proposition.

The markets didn't really budge. Apple only grew 1% in the traditional PC market (desktop/notebook) over the last 5 years and that's despite a wave of new products. The snapdragons are below 1%...

Indeed, like talking as if Apple mattered at all in server space, or digital workstations (studio is not a replacement for people willing to buy Mac Pros, which still keep being built with Intel Xeons).

While others run PlayStation and XBox.

The demographics aren't the same, nor the games.

I game a decent amount on table top games. Like tens of millions of others.