Comment by aurareturn
4 hours ago
Did Jeff Geerling get paid to post misleading headlines and reviews on Intel vs Apple?
He's basing this on his own "super computing benchmark" measuring only FP64 performance. Meanwhile, any normal person using these $600 laptops will never run FP64 supercomputing tasks on the CPU.
He also only showed perf/watt in this one benchmark but skipped the fact that Apple Silicon is significantly faster.
Obviously, all this efficiency is on the low end—the laptop only achieves a little over 120 Gflops, while Apple's faster M3 and M4 Macs are pushing through up to 1.2 Teraflops.
I can't believe this crap is getting upvoted. Hopefully this guy loses all his credibility going forward. This kind of post is seriously misleading and smells like like an undisclosed sponsor review.
No, this laptop was loaned to me for a couple weeks (it's boxed up and ready to ship back now), and I fully disclose any and all sponsorship (this was not sponsored in any way); see my policies here: https://github.com/geerlingguy/youtube#sponsorships
Further, I'm basing my opinion on a number of benchmarks and power measurements besides just HPL. I just favor that because it's one of the few that push a CPU hard, fills system memory, and can't easily be gamed/made irrelevant with new architecture.
The main point of my blog post is to say this is the first Intel chip that's even punched in the same weight class as any Apple Silicon, wrt efficiency. It quite surprised me.
This is your actual headline:
You're basing the headline on a single FP64 test for a $600 laptop. Come on man.
If your headline was being honest, it'd say "Apple A18 Pro is still 3-4x more efficient and significantly faster than Intel's low end chip in common tasks".
If this isn't an undisclosed sponsored review, then it's just misleading clickbait for Youtube views. It's clearly working for you.
You can do better.
I had three YouTube titles, this one got about 2x the watch time as the other two, so I let YT pick it.
For technical readers, I write my blog posts. I don't have to (I lose money hosting that thing and all it's mostly just free training data for Anthropic, OpenAI, et all), but I enjoy writing, so I do it anyway. If you don't like the YT game, please subscribe to the blog's RSS feed. I much prefer text over video.
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Getting performance per watt out of the smaller CPUs is actually more impressive because they can't amortize the non-CPU power draws in the system over as much performance. Increasing the performance while maintaining that performance per watt is then entirely straightforward because you just use more of the same cores.
Except Intel's Core 5 320 is almost certainly bigger than the A18 Pro CPU.
They both have 2 P-cores and 4 E-cores.
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> This is like saying my Intel Pentium 3 matches Apple M5 in perf/watt
... if it was within orders of magnitude of being true, perhaps.