← Back to context

Comment by throwa356262

15 days ago

First of all, Apple CPUs are not the fastest. In fact top 20 fastest CPUs right now is probably an AMD and Intel only affair.

Apples CPUs are most powerful efficient however, due to a bunch of design and manufacturing choices.

But to answer your question, yes Windows 11 with modern security crap feels 2-3 slower than vanilla Linux on the same hardware.

39 comments

throwa356262

Reply
nerdsniper  15 days ago

I do believe Apple are still the fastest single-core (M5, A19 Pro, and M3 Ultra leading), which still matters for a shocking amount of my workloads. But only the M5 has any noticeable gap vs Intel (~16%). Also the rankings are a bit gamed because AMD and Intel put out a LOT of SKU's that are nearly the same product, so whenever they're "winning" on a benchmark they take up a bunch of slots right next to eachother even though they're all basically the exact same chip.

Also, all the top nearly 50 multi-core benchmarks are taken up by Epyc and Xeon chips. For desktop/laptop chips that aren't Threadripper, Apple still leads with the M3 Ultra 32-core in multi-core passmark benchmark. The usual caveats of benchmarks not being representative of any actual workload still apply, of course.

And Apple does lag behind in multi-core benchmarks for laptop chips - The M3 Ultra is not offered in a laptop form-factor, but it does beat every AMD/Intel laptop chip as well in multicore benchmarks.

  • deaddodo  15 days ago

    No, the AMD headliners still dominate for single-core performance[1]. Even if you normalize for similar/"same" chips; which really just means you have five cores each generation: AMD's, Intel's, Apple's, and ARM Cortex-A and Cortex-X.

    Obviously it's an Apple-to-Oranges (pardon the pun) comparison since the AMD options don't need to care about the power envelope nearly as much; and the comparison gets more equal when normalizing for Apple's optimized domain (power efficiency), but the high-end AMD laptop chips still edge it out.

    But then this turns into some sort of religious war, where people want to assume that their "god" should win at everything. It's not, the Apple chips are great; amazing even, when considering they're powering laptops/phones for 10+ hours at a time in smaller chassis than their competitors. But they still have to give in certain metrics to hit that envelope.

    1 - https://thepcbottleneckcalculator.com/cpu-benchmarks-2026/

  • throwa356262  15 days ago

    Even at the time of announcement M5 was not the fastest chip. Not even on single core benchmark where apple usually shines due to the design choice of having fewer but more powerful cores (AMD for examples does the opposite). For example on geekbench Core i9-14900KS and Core Ultra 9 285K were faster.

    The distance was not huge, maybe 3%. You can obviously pick and choose your benchmarks until you find one where "your" CPU happens to be the best.

ajross  15 days ago

> First of all, Apple CPUs are not the fastest.

The cores are. Nothing is beating a M4/M5 on single CPU performance, and per-cycle nothing is even particularly close.

At the whole-chip level, there are bigger devices from the x86 vendors which will pull ahead on parallel benchmarks. And Apple's unfortunate allergy to effective cooling techniques (like, "faster fans move more air") means that they tend to throttle on chip-scale loads[1].

But if you just want to Run One Thing really fast, which even today still correlates better to "machine feels fast" than parallel loads, Apple is the undisputed king.

[1] One of the reasons Geekbench 6, which controversially includes cooling pauses, looks so much better for Apple than version 5 did.

  • drob518  15 days ago

    For laptops at least, I appreciate not having fans that sound like a helicopter. I guess for Mac Mini and Mac Studio having more fan noise is acceptable (maybe a switch would be nice). One of the things that I love about my Air is there is zero fan noise all the time. Yes, it throttles, and 99% of the time I don’t notice and don’t care. Yes, I know there are workloads where it would be very noticeable and I would care, but I don’t personally run too many CPU bound tasks.

    • zozbot234  15 days ago

      Bigger fans can move a lot more air while being less noisy, so if you care about a silent profile for any given amount of work the Mac Studio (or the Mac Mini if you don't need the full power of a Studio) is the best choice.

    • cosmic_cheese  15 days ago

      Same. It’s always disappointing when otherwise promising competing laptops turn out to be considerably more noisy if you’re doing anything more intense than using MS Paint.

      It’s probably the single most common corner to cut in x86 laptops. Manufacturers love to shove hot chips into a chassis too thin for them and then toss in whatever cheap tiny-whiny-fan cooling solution they happen to have on hand. Result: laptop sounds like a jet engine when the CPU is being pushed.

      6 replies →

  • gpderetta  15 days ago

    It doesn't really make much sense to compare per-cycle performance across microarchitectures as there are multiple valid trade-offs.

    Of course Apple did pick a very good sweet spot favoring a wide core as opposed to a speed daemon more than the competition.

    • ajross  15 days ago

      > It doesn't really make much sense to compare per-cycle performance across microarchitectures as there are multiple valid trade-offs.

      That's true in principle, but IMHO a little too evasive. In point of fact Apple 100% won this round. Their wider architecture is actually faster than the competition in an absolute sense even at the deployed clock rates. There's really no significant market where you'd want to use anything different for CPU compute anywhere. Datacenters would absolutely buy M5 racks if they were offered. M5 efficiency cores are better than Intel's or Zen 5c every time they're measured too.

      Just about the only spaces where Apple is behind[1] are die size and packaging: their cores take a little more area per benchmark point, and they're still shipping big single dies. And they finance both of those shortcomings with much higher per-part margins.

      Intel and AMD have moved hard into tiled architectures and it seems to be working out for them. I'd expect Apple to do the same soon.

      [1] Well, except the big elephant in the room that "CPU Performance Doesn't Matter Much Anymore". Consumer CPUs are fast enough and have been for years now, and the stuff that feels slow is on the GPU or the cloud these days. Apple's in critical danger of being commoditized out of its market space, but then that's true of every premium vendor throughout history.

      2 replies →

    • llm_nerd  15 days ago

      I don't get your first line. When people talk about Apple's core speeds they're not talking about cycles per instruction or something, they're talking about single-thread performance on a benchmark like Geekbench. Geekbench runs various real-world code and it's the gross throughput that is measured, and it's there that Apple cores shine.

rahkiin  15 days ago

My windows with corporate crap is sometimes 2000x slower than without corporate crap. And consistently 10x slower than an M3

  • indemnity  15 days ago

    Don’t worry, my new M4 doesn’t feel much faster either due to all the corporate crapware. Since Windows Defender got ported to Mac it’s become terrible in I/O and overall responsiveness. Any file operations will consume an entire core or two on Defender processes.

    My personal M1 feels just as fast as the work M4 due to this.

  • PaulHoule  15 days ago

    I was impressed with my M4 mini when I got it a year ago but sometime after the Liquid Glass update it is now: beachball… beachball… beachball… reboot… beachball… beachball… Reminds me of the bad old days of Win XP.

    • nerdsniper  15 days ago

      How much RAM do you have? That seems to be the main thing that slows down my MacBooks (original launch-day 16GB M1 MBP and 32 GB M2 Pro). The M1 CPU is finally starting to show its age for some things, but the M2 Pro is really only RAM limited in perceived speed for me.

  • leptons  15 days ago

    Those sound like very well tested numbers, founded in reality /s

    • rahkiin  14 days ago

      I did. On equal hardware, in same order, with same windows version, on clean installs. ‘npm install’ is very file-heavy and Windows with corpware hates small files especially with the .js extension

llm_nerd  15 days ago

Nowhere in the submission or even the comment you replied to did anyone say "fastest". The incredibly weird knee-jerk defensiveness by some is bizarre.

It was a discussion about how the P cores are left ready to speedily respond to input via the E cores satisfying background needs, in this case talking specifically about Apple Silicon because that's the writer's interest. But of course loads of chips have P and E cores, for the same reason.

vachina  15 days ago

My RHEL vnc feels snappier than the Windows 11 client it’s running on.

With maximum corporate spyware it consistently takes 1 second to get a visual feedback on Windows.

ksec  15 days ago

>First of all, Apple CPUs are not the fastest. In fact top 20 fastest CPUs right now is probably an AMD and Intel only affair.

You are comparing 256 AMD Zen6c Core to What? M4 Max?

When people say CPU they meant CPU Core, And in terms of Raw Speed, Apple CPU holds the fastest single core CPU benchmarks.