Yes, Intel/AMD cannot match Apple in efficiency.

But Apple cannot beat Intel/AMD in single-thread performance. (Apple marketing works very hard to convince people otherwise, but don't fall for it.) Apple gets very, very close, but they just don't get there. (As well, you might say they get close enough for practical matters; that might be true, but it's not the question here.)

That gap, however small it might be for the end user, is absolutely massive on the chip design level. x86 chips are tuned from the doping profiles of the silicon all the way through to their heatsinks to be single-thread fast. That last 1%? 2%? 5%? of performance is expensive, and is far far far past the point of diminishing returns in turns of efficiency cost paid. That last 20% of performance burns 80% of the power. Apple has chosen not to do things this way.

So x86 chips are not particularly well tuned to be efficient. They never have been; it's, on some level, a cultural problem. Could they be? Of course! But then the customers who want what x86 is right now would be sad. There are a lot of customers who like the current models, from hyperscalers to gamers. But they're increasingly bad fits for modern "personal computing", a use case which Apple owns. So why not have two models? When I said "doping profiles of the silicon" above, that wasn't hyperbole, that's literally true. It is a big deal to maintain a max-performance design and a max-efficiency design. They might have the same RTL but everything else will be different. Intel at their peak could have done it (but was too hubristic to try); no one else manufacturing x86 has had the resources. (You'll note that all non-Apple ARM vendor chips are pure efficiency designs, and don't even get close to Apple or Intel/AMD. This is not an accident. They don't have the resources to really optimize for either one of these goals. It is hard to do.)

Thus, the current situation: Apple has a max-efficiency design that's excellent for personal computing. Intel/AMD have aging max-performance designs that do beat Apple at absolute peak... which looks less and less like the right choice with every passing month. Will they continue on that path? Who knows! But many of their customers have historically liked this choice. And everyone else... isn't great at either.

> Apple has a max-efficiency design that's excellent for personal computing. Intel/AMD have aging max-performance designs that do beat Apple at absolute peak...

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.

In other words if Intel is so good, why is it... so bad? I genuinely don't understand. Keep in mind though, I'm not comparing an Intel gaming computer to a laptop, let's compare oranges to oranges.

  But Apple cannot beat Intel/AMD in single-thread performance.

> looks less and less like the right choice with every passing month

It does seem like for at least the last 3-5 years it's been pretty clear that Intel x86 was optimizing for the wrong target / a shrinking market.

HPC increasingly doesn't care about single core/thread performance and is increasingly GPU centric.

Anything that cares about efficiency/heat (basically all consumer now - mobile, tablet, laptop, even small desktop) has gone ARM/RISC.

Datacenter market is increasingly run by hyperscalers doing their own chip designs or using AMD for cost reasons.

It's the gaming/HPC focus, sure you can achieve some stunning benchmark numbers with nice vectorized straightforward code.

In the real world we have our computers running JIT'ed JS, Java or similar code taking up our cpu time, tons of small branches (mostly taken the same way and easily remembered by the branch predictor) and scattering reads/writes all over memory.

Transistors not spent on larger branch prediction caches or L1 caches are badly spent, doesn't matter if the CPU can issue a few less instructions per clock to ace an benchmark if it's waiting for branch mispredictions or cache misses most of the time.

There's no coincidence that the Apple teams iirc are partly the same people that built Pentium-M (that begun the Core era by delivering very good perf on mobile chips when P4 was supposed to be the flagship).

> But Apple cannot beat Intel/AMD in single-thread performance

It's literally one of the main Apple M chips advantage over Intel/AMD. At the time when M chip came out, it was the only chip that managed to consume ~100GB/s of MBW with just a single thread.

https://web.archive.org/web/20240902200818/https://www.anand...

> From a single core perspective, meaning from a single software thread, things are quite impressive for the chip, as it’s able to stress the memory fabric to up to 102GB/s. This is extremely impressive and outperforms any other design in the industry by multiple factors, we had already noted that the M1 chip was able to fully saturate its memory bandwidth with a single core and that the bottleneck had been on the DRAM itself.

Let's not forget- there shouldn't be anything preventing you from setting PL1 and PL2 power levels in linux or windows, AMD or Intel. Sometimes you can even set them in the Bios.

Letting you limit just how much of that extra 20% power hogging perf you want.