A phone CPU challenging a top of the line desktop GPU is crazy.
Desktop CPU, with a 170W TDP.
Granted, the comparison is an extremely specific synthetic benchmark, but still, I agree: utterly wild.
I have to demonstrate to my friends every time how my MBP M2 blows my Ryzen 5950x desktop out of the water for my professional line of work.
I can’t catch quite the drift what x86/x64 chips are good for anymore, other than gaming, nostalgia and spec boasting.
I have a 5950X computer and a Mac mini with some form of M2.
I render video on the M2 computer because I have that sweet indefinite Final Cut Pro license, but then I copy it to the 5950X computer and use ffmpeg to recompress it, which is like an order of magnitude faster than using the M2 computer to do the video compression.
I have some other tasks I’ve given both computers and when the 5950X actually gets to use all its cores, it blows the M2 out of the water.
I can’t catch quite the drift what x86/x64 chips are good for anymore, other than gaming, nostalgia and spec boasting.
Probably two things:
- Cost- and power-no-object performance, which isn’t necessarily a positive as it encourages bad behaviour.
- The platform is much more open, courtesy of some quirks of how IBM spec’ed BIOS back before the dawn of time. Yes, you can get ARM and RISC-V licenses (openPOWER is kind of a non-entity these days) and design your own SBC, but every single ARM and RISC-V machine boots differently, while x86 and amd64 have a standard boot process.
All those fancy “CoPilot ready” Qualcomm machines? They’re following the same path as ARM-based smartphones have, where every single machine is bespoke and you’re looking for specific boot images on whatever the equivalent of xda-developers is, or (and this is more likely) just scrapping them when they’re used up, which will probably happen a lot faster, given Qualcomm’s history with support.
I’d love to see a replacement for x86/amd64 that isn’t a power suck, but has an open interface to BIOS.
