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