> then hundreds of dollars to service when they break

Can you explain what do you mean by that? It is quite rare to see broken trrs jack on a laptop, at least I have never experienced one, nor on walkman or anything getting heavy plug/unplug use.

I thought it is an issue in reducing the cost to manufacture the case or something.

We've got laptops with modular USB-C ports that solve this effectively perfectly. An audio one would be even simpler. The only reason you don't see it everywhere is because they're being outrageously hostile to repairs, and choosing to charge you hundreds of dollars for repairs on a part that they know is easily broken.

My (Razer Blackshark) gaming headset does that - the actual headset has a 3.5mm jack on it but the "guts" is a USB DAC with some THX stuff supposedly built in (questionable utility but most of the games I play don't support it anyway) - I figure they reuse the same headset components down the market and just don't ship the DAC, it works flawlessly under Windows/Linux so no real issues with it and I can use it with any other set of wired headphones (of similar impedance) which is nice since headsets wear out eventually but the DAC is solid state so should last much longer.

I think the Top500 benchmark is biased here. It’s a supercomputing benchmark which means it’s going to heavily weight SIMD and float64 performance, which are things that rarely matter for everyday computing. SIMD has uses in the real world - image or video editing, data crunching, graphics. But consumers basically never use fp64 any more, and so many modern chips have next to zero performance on them. That could easily skew the numbers in intel’s favor.

I suspect that the comment is more about this not being Apple’s best standard consumer CPU for computers, which would be the M5 (though to your point that’s also in iPads).

It’s good Intel can match anything while staying cool and efficient. That’s a great step. But I’d like to see them match the M5.

Phone is a sort of short hand for what tradeoffs are likely in the chip. A phone processor is going to prioritize efficiency and thermals over raw performance. Mobile will strike a different balance. While desktop likely prioritizes raw power over performance per watt, thermals be damned!

Phones have markedly different thermal limits compared to desktop or even laptops. A laptop CPU can easily suck 30W or more while a phone might not ever reach 10W.

Hmm, I'm using the CachyOS kernel but on NixOS. What CPU/GPU are you using?

I tried using the flatpak Chromium in case it was some NixOS build optimization oddities but didn't see much of a difference.

These tests were done on the CPU cores, not on the GPU. In every test I ran the A18 chip blew past Intel's Core 5 on GPU performance.

There were a series of other benchmarks too, but the Hackaday article only highlights HPL as that was the benchmark that changed my perspective on Intel a bit. This was the first X86 chip to trade blows in efficiency (and idle power draw) with Apple's M3/M4 (I don't have any M5 to test with right now).

Not only that, the efficiency (FP64, HPL) is also beating all the M4/M3/M2/M1 systems I've tested besides the M4 Mac mini: https://github.com/geerlingguy/top500-benchmark#results

I think the bigger news is Intel's made a chip that isn't just pushing clocks to hit some performance number, they've actually tuned clocks for efficiency... which also leads to much better battery life.

And the fan on the system in the original article[1] also allows the Intel system to run substantially faster for longer tasks (where the Neo thermally saturates and has to stay throttled).

(The iGPU is another matter... sadly still a bit lacking.)

I'm hoping Intel makes a follow-up to the N100-series chips with just four of their newer low power E-cores.

[1] https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2026/excited-for-intel-eff...

I don’t think it’s completely unfair to say that the Neo is based on a chip that was first announced in Sep 2024 while the Intel chip is from Apr 2026.

Also, I think the battery life most people are practically interested in is more like running (close to) idle and less like the number of Watts spent when running maxed out, and I wouldn’t be surprised if Arm chips still win on that metric…

> Comments like this one remind me of all the people saying "China can't invent things, they can only copy the US" 20 years ago.

We still get these comments. Now about AI. China can only distill and are still years behind. Well well...