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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
The laws of physics apply to everyone
That is obviously true, but a ridiculous argument, there are plenty examples of systems performing better and using less power than the competition.
For years Intel chips used twice the power for similar performance compared to AMD Ryzen. And in the Buldozer days it was the same except the other way around.
Arm has designed chips for efficiency for a decade before the first smartphones came out, and they’ve kept their eye on the ball the entire time since.
It’s no wonder Arm is way more energy efficient than X86, and Apple made by far the best Arm CPU when M1 arrived.
The great advantage of Apple is that they are usually a node ahead
Yes that is an advantage, but so it is for the new Intel Arrow Lake compared to current Ryzen, yet Arrow Lake use more power for similar performance. Despite Arrow Lake is designed for efficiency.
It’s notable that Intel was unable to match Arm on power efficiency for an entire decade, even when Intel had the better production node. So it’s not just a matter of physics, it is also very much a matter of design. And Intel has never been able to match Arm on that. Arm still has the superior design for energy efficiency over X86, and AMD has the superior design over Intel.
Intel has had a node disadvantage regarding Zen since the 8700K… From then on the entire point is moot.
