this post was submitted on 04 Nov 2024
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[–] [email protected] 20 points 1 week ago (19 children)

I'm an antifan of Apple but the M4 Max is supposed to be faster than any x86 desktop CPU, and use a lot less power. That's per geekbench 6. I'd be interested in seeing other measurements.

[–] [email protected] 41 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (18 children)

Geekbech is as useful as a metric as an umbrella on a fish. Also the M4 max will not consume less energy than the competition. That is a misconception arising from the lower skus in mobile devices. The laws of physics apply to everyone, at the same reticle size the energy consumption in nT worlkloads is equivalent. The great advantage of Apple is that they are usually a node ahead and the eschewing of legacy compatibility saves space and thus energy in the design that can be leveraged to reduce power consumption on idle or 1T. Case in point, Intel's latest mobile CPUs.

[–] [email protected] 27 points 1 week ago (2 children)

Exactly, the apple chips excel at low power tasks and will consume basically nothing doing them. It's also good for small bursty tasks, but for long lived intensive tasks it behaves basically the same as an equivalent x86 chip. People don't seem to know that these chips can easily consume 80-90W of power when going full tilt.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 week ago (2 children)

The new Intel Arrow Lake is supposed to max out at 150W, but it doesn't. And that's still almost 40% better than previous gen Intel!
So hovering around 80-90W max is pretty modest by today's standards.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 week ago (2 children)

That's impressive, or should I say scary? 150w is a lot of heat to dissipate... I hope those aren't laptop chips...

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 week ago

The 14900k is an absolute oven

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 week ago

No but the M4 Max is claimed to be as fast, and Intel improved their chip, so it's down from 250W for previous gen! And the M4 Max is faster.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 week ago

Oh of course, the apple chips are faster, and this is likely a combination of more efficiency thanks to the newer process node and apple being able to optimize the chips and power draw much better because they make everything. Apple can also afford to use larger chips because they make a profit on the entire computer, not just the processor itself.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 week ago (1 children)

We're condemned to suffer uninformed masses on this. Zen 5 mobile is on N4p at 143transistors/um2, the M4max is on N3E at 213transistors/um2. That's a gigantic advantage in power savings and logic per mm2 of die. Granted, I don't think the chiplet design will ever reach ARM levels of power gating but that's a price I'm willing to pay to keep legacy compatibility and expandable RAM and storage. That IO die will always be problematic unless they integrate it in the SOC but I'd prefer if they don't. (Integration also has power saving advantages, just look at Intel's latest mobile foray)

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 week ago

Not to mention, Apple is able to afford the larger die size per chip since they do vertical integration and don't have to worry about the cost of each chip in the way that Intel and AMD has to when they sell to device manufacturers.

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