Sure. Insofar as Apple Silicon beats these things, "I'll take less powerful hardware if it means I'm not stuck with the Apple ecosystem" is a perfectly reasonable tradeoff to make. Two things, though.

First, I don't like making blind tradeoffs. If what I need (for whatever reason) is a really beefy ARM CPU, I'd like to know what the "Apple-less tax" costs me (if anything!)

Second, the status quo is that Apple Silicon is the undisputed king of ARM CPU performance, so it's the obvious benchmark to compare this thing against. Providing that context is just basic journalistic practice, even if just to say "but it's irrelevant because we can't use the hardware without the software".

▲

bluGill 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Why do you need ARM? There is nothing magic, most CPUs are an internal instruction set with a decoder on top. bad as x86 is, decoding is not the issue. they can make lower power use x86 if they want. They can also make mips or riskv chips that are good.

	▲	pdpi 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		There's nothing special about ARM, sure. Hence "for whatever reason". Still, ARM is a known quantity, and the leading alternative to x86 for desktop CPUs. The article is titled "reaching desktop performance". We know how Apple's hardware performs on native workloads. We know how it performs emulating x86 workloads (and why). Surely "... and this is how this hardware measures up against the other guys trying to achieve the exact same thing" is a relevant comparison? I can't be the only person who reads "reaching desktop performance" and wonders "you mean comparable to the M1, or to the M3 Ultra?"

▲

amelius 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Let's say my company makes systems for in-flight entertainment, with content from my company.

I am looking for a CPU.

I don't want to confront my users with "Please enter your Apple ID" or any other unexpected messages that I have no control over.

Is Apple M series an option for me?

▲

buran77 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

This CPU will end up in products that are competing against Apple's in the market. People will look at and choose between two products with X925 or M4/5. It's a very obvious parallel and a big oversight for the article.

For better or worse if you make a (high end) consumer CPU it will be judged against the M-series, just like if you make a high end phone it will be judged against the iPhone.

▲

ghosty141 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Why should it be?

All he is saying: We currently have products in a similar product category (arm based desktop computers) that are widely used and have known benchmark scores (and general reviews) and it would make sense if I publish a new cpu for the same product category ("Reaching Desktop Performance" implies that) that I'd compare it to the known alternatives.

In the end you can just run Asahi on your macbook, the OS is not that relevant here. A comparison to macbooks running Asahi Linux would be fine.

▲

amelius 2 hours ago | parent [-]

But why would an article address _their_ specific usecase?

▲

buran77 2 hours ago | parent [-]

> But why would an article address _their_ specific usecase?

amelius, if anyone had specific requirements, it was you with your "systems for in-flight entertainment".

OP asked a very reasonable question for a very generic comparison to the 800-pound gorilla in the consumer CPU world in general, and ARM CPU world in particular.

If the article can reference AMD's Zen 5 cores and Intel's Lion/Sunny Cove, they could have made at least a brief reference to M-series CPUs. As a reader and potential buyer of any of them, I find it would have been a very useful comparison.

▲

amelius an hour ago | parent [-]

In industry, people want to take computing parts and build products with them.

This is not possible with Apple parts.

That's what my example was about. It was only specific because I wanted to have a concrete example.

	▲	buran77 an hour ago \| parent [-]
		> In industry Talk about specifics, eh? Didn't you just argue against an article addressing "_their_" specific usecase? In a store people will ask "is this better than an Apple?". And I'll tell you one more thing, when I was in the industry and taking computing parts to build products with them I did not form an opinion by reading internet reviews. I haven't met anyone who did.

▲

rick_dalton 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

The X925 core is used in chips like the gb10 for the nvidia dgx spark. So it is relevant to compare to apple silicon performance imo. The mac studio is pretty much a competitor to it.