Comment by MBCook
11 hours ago
Apple has been working ruthlessly on battery efficiency for a long time because of the phones and their tendency to minimize battery sizes on Macs for thinness.
The exact design of the cores, how they’re scheduled, the way background stuff is handled on MacOS. All of it. The chips are made on a fantastic process too, but that alone isn’t it. For example they’ve been putting the ability to drop refresh rate really low when nothing changes to more and more of their machines.
It could be that the Intel chip is close, IDK.
But add in other motherboard components, the screen, the OS, the software and system libraries, all are optimized together to hit those numbers. And any of those alone or in combination could be part of the differences.
> their tendency to minimize battery sizes on Macs for thinness.
Is this actually a thing? Macbook Pro goes up to 100 Wh and almost nobody goes above that because it's the highest capacity battery you don't need special permission to have in a carry on at the airport.
> But add in other motherboard components, the screen, the OS, the software and system libraries, all are optimized together to hit those numbers.
I always find this argument weird because there is so little actual "together" having anything to do with it. Are TSMC's current process nodes efficient? Yes. Can you save power by dropping the refresh rate? Yes. Do the teams doing these things need to coordinate with each other somehow rather than each doing their part independently? Not really.
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 run a number of other benchmarks for a better comparison (linked from my blog post: https://github.com/geerlingguy/sbc-reviews/issues/111).
The Intel chip holds its own for multicore in less bursty workloads, where the fans help.
An interesting thing there is how much better the Geekbench scores are on Linux than Windows. Makes you think how the Intel/AMD chips would compare to Apple when both running the same OS. Or even just when both not being held back by Windows.
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> consumers basically never use fp64 any more
They do in audio processing. ;)
I usually use fp32 for the sole reason I can fit twice as many ~24 bit samples per register.
What? Pretty much every general-purpose calculation on your computer that isn’t an integer is done with FP64. AI may not use it and games may prefer FP32 for many things, but your CPU certainly does a ton of FP64 work.
Which workloads?
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