Right, so as I understand it people see that x86-64 designs score poorly on a set of benchmarks and infer that it is because they are x86-64.

In fact it’s because that manufacturer has made architectural choices that are not inherent to the x86-64 ISA.

And that’s just hardware. MacOS gets roughly 30% better battery life on M series hardware than Asahi Linux. I’m not blaming the Asahi team, they do amazing work, they don’t even work on many of the Linux features relevant to power management, and Apple has had years of head start on preparing for and optimising for the M architecture. It’s just that software matters, a lot.

So if I’m reading this right, ISA can make a difference, but it’s incremental compared to the many architectural decisions and trade offs that go into a particular design.

Does anyone care about blaming / lauding an ISA without any connection to the actual devices that people use?

Performance and battery life are lived experiences. There’s probably some theoretical hyper optimization where 6502 ISA is just as good as ARM, but does it matter?

You're not taking into account dynamic clock speeds, just "idle" and "load." Most CPUs have configurable TDP, and if you give them more power they will run more cores at a higher frequency. Suppose I measured the same laptop CPU under "full load" in two different computers at full load, but one is configured for a 30w TDP and the other is configured for a 40w TDP. The first PC will be more efficient, because you get diminishing returns for increased power. But it's the same CPU.

To go back to your original argument, you're claiming that x86 ISA is more efficient than ARM because a certain AMD chip beat certain M1/snapdragon chips at 50w. You can't draw that conclusion because the two chips may be designed to have peak efficiency at different power levels, even if the maximum power draw is the same. Likely the Snapdragon/M1 have better efficiency at 10W with reduced clock speed even if the CPU is not idling.

Hence my response: it doesn't make sense to talk about performance per watt, without also specifying the workload. Not only will different workloads use different amounts of power, they will also rely on different instructions which may give different ISAs or CPUs the edge.

Not to mention -- who even cares about ISA efficiency? What matters is the result for the product I can buy. If M1/snapdragon are able to match AMD on performance but beat it in battery life for my workloads, I don't care if AMD has better "performance per watt" according to your metric.

https://techjourneyman.com/blog/m1-ultra-vs-nvidia-rtx-3090/

Look at their updated graph which has less BS. It's never close in perf/watt.

The BS part about apples graph was that they cut the graph short for the nvidia card (and bending the graph a bit at the end). The full graph still shows apple being way better per watt.

How do you think Nvidia got Samsung’s 8nm process to be just as power efficient as TSMC’s 5nm node?

https://techjourneyman.com/blog/m1-ultra-vs-nvidia-rtx-3090/

Look at that updated graph which has less BS. It's never close in perf/watt.

The BS part about apples graph was that they cut the graph short for the nvidia card (and bending the graph a bit at the end). The full graph still shows apple being way better per watt.

OS does matter, with Linux my M1 macbook gets kinda hot and it cannot do more than 1.5-2h of google meetings with cameras on. IIRC google meetings on macos were at least a bit more efficient.

Though it has definitely been getting better in the last 1.5 years using Asahi Linux and in some areas it is a better experience than most laptops running Linux (sound, cameras, etc.). The developers even wrote a full fledged physical speaker simulator just so it could be efficiently driven over its "naive" limits.

Linux can definitely help with this, I had the same experience with it on Z1 (SteamOS). But even running Windows 11 in a VM on M1 does not make the machine run hot