Comment by lillecarl
10 months ago
Another uphill battle that I haven't seen anyone mention is just how good mobile AMD chips got a year or so after the M1 release. I wouldn't buy a Mac to run Linux on it when I can buy a Lenovo with equally soldered parts that'll work well with the OS I wanna run already.
A lot of it is simply AMD getting on newer TSMC nodes. Most of the Apple's efficiency head start is better process (they got exclusive access to 5nm at first).
That's my understanding as well, as soon as the node exclusivity dropped they were ballpark equal.
Many ARM SOC are designed to run on battery only so the wireless packages and low power states are better, my AMD couldn't go below 400mhz.
But yeah the "Apple M hardware is miles and leagues away" hypetrain was just a hypetrain. Impressive and genuinely great but not revolutionary, at best incremental.
I hope to be able to run ARM on an unlocked laptop soon. I run a Chromebook as extra laptop with a MediaTek 520 chip and it's got 2 days battery life, AMD isn't quite there yet.
> But yeah the "Apple M hardware is miles and leagues away" hypetrain was just a hypetrain. Impressive and genuinely great but not revolutionary, at best incremental.
It's more nuanced than that. Apple effectively pulled a "Sony A7-III" move. Released something one generation ahead before everybody else, and disrupted everyone.
Sony called "A7-III" entry level mirrorless, but it had much more features even when compared to the higher-end SLRs of the era, and effectively pulled every other camera on the market one level down.
I don't think even they thought they'd keep that gap forever. I personally didn't think it either, but when it was released, it was leaps and bounds ahead, and forced other manufacturers to do the same to stay relevant.
They pulled everyone upwards, and now they continue their move. If not this, they also showed that computers can be miniaturized much more. Intel N100 and RaspberryPi/OrangePi 5 provides so much performance for daily tasks, so unimaginable things at that size are considered normal now.
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>But yeah the "Apple M hardware is miles and leagues away" hypetrain was just a hypetrain. Impressive and genuinely great but not revolutionary, at best incremental.
Compared to the incremental changes we've seen the previous 10 years before it arrived on AMD/Intel space, it was revolutionary.
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And some of these Lenovos are relatively upgradable too. I'm using a ThinkPad I bought refurbished (with a 2 year warranty) and upgraded myself to 40 GB of RAM and 1TB of SSD (there's another slot too if I need it). It cost me $350 including the part upgrades.
There's also the Framework option now.
It took them a while to, but they finally offer boards based on AMD chips.
I don't need an upgrade now, but I feel a RISC-V framework is feasible once I do.
Where did you find a deal like that? Quick googling couldn't find it for me
Prices seem to have risen a bit since I bought mine. Here's a similar model with a Ryzen 5 7530U for $355: https://www.ebay.com/itm/156626070024 It is certified refurbished and has a two year warranty. It has a SODIMM slot and supports dual SSDs, although not the full size M.2.
The M1 reset expectations for laptop battery life and performance, and the result has been great for all platforms.