  Intel and AMD have implemented these improvements with Lunar Lake and Strix Halo. You can buy an x86 laptop with Macbook-like efficiency right now if you know which SoCs to pick.

M4 is about 3.6x more efficient than Strix Halo when under load.[0] On a daily basis, this difference can be more because Apple Silicon has true big.Little cores that send low priority tasks to the highly efficient small cores.

For Lunar Lake, base M4 is about 35% faster, 2x more efficient, and actually has a bigger die size than M4.[1] Intel is discontinuing the Lunar Lake line because it isn't profitable for them.

I'm not sure how you can claim "Mac-like efficiency".

[0]https://imgur.com/a/yvpEpKF

[1]https://www.notebookcheck.net/Intel-Lunar-Lake-CPU-analysis-...

▲ txrx0000 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

Pardon my loose choice of words regarding the Mac-like efficiency. I was referring to the fact that the battery life is comparable to the M3 in day-to-day use, as demonstrated at around the 5:00 mark in the third video I linked.

In the same video, they also measure perf/watt under heavy load, and it's close to the M1, but not the latest gen M4. I think that's pretty good considering it's a first gen product.

Regarding the discontinuation, it's still on shelves right now, but I'm not sure if there will be future generations. It would be awfully silly of them to discontinue it as it's the best non-Apple laptop chip you can buy right now if you care about efficiency.

▲ aurareturn 3 days ago | parent [-]

  In the same video, they also measure perf/watt under heavy load, and it's close to the M1, but not the latest gen M4. I think that's pretty good considering it's a first gen product.

Which video and timestamp? Are you aware that LNL throttles heavily when on battery life?

On battery life, M1 is a whopping 1.5x faster in single thread.[0] That makes M4 2.47x faster when compared to LNL on battery.

So no, LNL is very far behind even M1. That's why there are no fanless LNL laptops.

[0]https://b2c-contenthub.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/Intel-...

[0]https://www.pcworld.com/article/2463714/tested-intels-lunar-...

[0]https://browser.geekbench.com/macs/macbook-air-late-2020

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txrx0000 3 days ago | parent [-]

I suspect the throttling behavior has to more do with the power settings used during testing or OEM tuning on specific models.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ymoiWv9BF7Q

In this video, they show the perf/watt curves at 8:30. And they show the on-battery vs on-wall performance at 18:35 across a wide variety of benchmarks, not just Geekbench. They used a Lenovo YOGA Air 15 on Window 11's "Balanced" power plan for their tests. The narrator specifically noted the Macbook-like on-battery performance.

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aurareturn 3 days ago | parent [-]

Reviewers always use max performance setting for benchmarks and then max battery life for battery tests. That's how people get tricked. When they actually buy the laptop and use it for themselves, they complain that it's slow when on battery life or hot/loud when plugged in.

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txrx0000 3 days ago | parent [-]

They're not trying to trick you. In fact when they were measuring perf/watt, the Lunar Lake chip was disadvantaged against the Apple M-series because they had to run the SPEC 2017 tests on Ubuntu for the Lunar Lake chip, which has poorer tuning for it compared to Windows 11. You can see a footnote saying the compilation environment was Ubuntu 24.04 LTS on the bottom left corner of the frame when they show the perf/watt graphs.

	▲	aurareturn 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		They are trying to trick you. All reviewers are told by Intel to run benchmarks in max performance mode and battery either in balanced or max efficiency mode. These modes will throttle. So the performance you're seeing in reviews aren't achievable in battery mode unless you're ok with drastically lower battery life. Meanwhile, PCWorld is one of the few that actually ran benchmarks while on battery life - which is what people will experience.

▲ legacynl 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Can somebody who knows about this stuff, please elaborate on if it's 'fair' in the first place to compare apple chips with amd/intel chips?

AMD and Intel chips run on loads of different hardware. On the other hand Apple is fully in control of what hardware (and software) their chips are used with. I don't know, but I assume there's a whole lot of tuning and optimizations that you can do when you don't have to support anything besides what you produce yourself.

Let's say it would hypothethically possible to put an M4 in a regular pc. Wouldn't it lose performance just by doing that?

▲ aurareturn 3 days ago | parent [-]

  Let's say it would hypothethically possible to put an M4 in a regular pc. Wouldn't it lose performance just by doing that?

Yes. But an M4 Max running macOS running Parallels running Windows on Arm is still the fastest Windows laptop in the world: https://browser.geekbench.com/v6/cpu/compare/13494385?baseli...

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legacynl 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

Yeah but an AMD/Intel CPU supports many different types of configurations. Isn't it unfair to compare a chip that only supports one configuration with one that supports many?

It feels to me like we're kind of comparing speeds between a personal automobile and a long haul truck. Yes, one is faster than the other, but that's meaningless, because both have different design considerations. A long haul truck has to be able to carry load, and that makes the design different. Of course they'll still make it as fast as possible, but it's never going to be the same as a car.

Basically what I'm saying is that because it's impossible to strip away all the performance and efficiency improvements that come from apple's total control of the software and hardware stack; is it really possible to conclude that apple sillicon itself is as impressive as they make it out to be?

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aurareturn 2 days ago | parent [-]

Yes because it’s still the fastest SoC running Windows. Further more, consumers don’t care if AMD and Intel have to go into more configurations. They care about what they’re buying for the money.

	▲	legacynl 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		> Further more, consumers don’t care Well, I'm a consumer, and I certainly care. But I get your point that a lot of people just want a machine that allows them to browse for 10 hours without needing to be charged, and don't really care about anything else. But do you also get my point? that on some level the chips/hardware are so different that it's like comparing apples to oranges?

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a_wild_dandan 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

That's absolutely wild. I've been loving using the 96GB of (V)RAM in my MacBook + Apple's mlx framework to run quantized AI reasoning models like glm-4.5-air. Running models with hundreds of billions of parameters (at ~14 tok/s) on my damn laptop feels like magic.