Apple is slightly pulling away. AMD's top desktop chips were on par with M1/M2/M3 1T but now they cannot match even M4 despite releasing a new design (Zen 5) this year.

It's partially because AMD is on a two year cadence while Apple is on approximately a yearly cadence. And AMD has no plans to increase the cadence of their Zen releases.

2020 - M1, Zen 3

2021 - ...

2022 - M2, Zen 4

2023 - M3

2024 - M4, Zen 5

Edit: I am looking at peak 1T performance, not efficiency. In that regard I don't think anyone has been close.

> Edit: I am looking at peak 1T performance, not efficiency. In that regard I don't think anyone has been close.

Indeed. Anything that approaches Apple performance does so at a much higher power consumption. Which is no biggie for a large-ish desktop (I often recommend getting middle-of-the-road tower servers for workstations).

Don’t thermals basically explode non-linearly with speed?

It’s possible Apple’s chips could be dramatically faster if they were willing to use up 300W.

I remember seeing an anecdote where Johny Srouji, the chief Apple Silicon designer, said something like the efficiency cores get 90% of the performance of the performance cores at like 10% of the power.

I don’t remember the exact numbers but it was staggering. While the single core wouldn’t be as high, it sounded as if they could (theoretically) make a chip of only 32 efficiency cores and just sip power.

I’m now imagining an “M4 Hot” for the next MacPro with an Intel Xeon W power budget.

> they could (theoretically) make a chip of only 32 efficiency cores and just sip power.

Intel and AMD did that with their latest data-center chips to compete with Ampere and AWS’s Graviton. I’d love to build a workstation out of one such beast.

Yeah it makes a lot of sense for servers. For normal desktop/laptop users who don’t need much parallelism it would just be wasted silicon.

> For normal desktop/laptop users

NEVER call me that ;-)!

Well, the two major factors for the quality of a CPU are the node its made on and the architecture.

If you want to evaluate the quality of two different architectures, you should be comparing samples on the same fab node.

M1 and Zen 4 were on the same node, and M3 and Zen 5 are on the same node. In both cases they're within spitting distance of one another.

The majority of Apple's advantage is just Apple paying for early access to TSMC's newest node.

Their margins tend to allow them to always use the latest TSMC process so they will often be pretty good just based on that. They are also ARM chips which obviously have been more focused on efficiency historically.

They actually work with TSMC to develop the latest nodes. They also fund the bulk of the development. It's not as if without Apple's funds someone else will get the same leading edge node.

To a greater or lesser extent, Apple funds tsmc’s latest nodes.

Oh how the mighty have fallen. For decades, when comparing Mac versus PCs, it was always about performance, with any other consideration always derided.

Yet here we are, with the excuses of margins and silicon processes generations. But you haven't answered the question. Is Apple pulling ahead or is the x86 cabal able to keep up?

Apple is ahead. The fab stuff is an explanation of why they are ahead, not an excuse for being behind.

My assessment is that ARM is running away from the competition. Apple is indeed designing the chip, but without the ARM architecture, Apple would have nothing to work with. This is not to diminish the incredible work of Apple’s VLSI team who put the chip architecture together and deftly navigated the Wild West of the fabrication landscape, but if you look at the specialized server chip side, it’s now dominated by ARM IP. I think ARM is the real winner here.

Even compared to other ARM cores, Apple is in a league of its own.

They have a good silicon design team, but having so much money that they can just buy out exclusive access to TSMCs most advanced processes doesn't hurt either. The closest ARM competitor to the M4, the Snapdragon X Elite, is a full node behind on 4nm while Apple is already using 2nd generation 3nm.

So then it should be comparable to the M1 or M2? Which isn't bad at all, if true.

But is it, for the same power consumption?

For some benchmarks the Snapdragon is on par with the M3. But the weirdo tests I found online did not say which device they compared, since the M3 is available in fan-less machines, which limits its potential.

Outside of Ampere(who are really more server focused) who else is designing desktop/laptop ARM cpus?

That’s a really fair point. I think it’s tough for anyone else to break into the consumer / desktop segment with ARM chips. Apple can do it because they control the whole stack.

Qualcomm and Nvidia.

NVIDIA don’t have custom cores

What if I told you they don't need them.

What if I told you that the rest of the context was about custom cores.

They also have the advantage that they could break software compatibility with the M1, e.g. using 16 kB pages and 128 byte cache blocks.

They do mixed page mode depending on the program running.

Is this really about the architecture itself, or about the licensing of it? AMD and Intel are, afaik, the only ones legally allowed to use x86, and likely have no plans to allow anyone else.

AMD's latest Strix Point mobile chips are on par with M3 silicon: https://youtube.com/watch?v=Z8WKR0VHfJw

I was looking into this recently as my M1 Max screen suddenly died out of the blue within warranty and Apple are complete crooks wrt honouring warranties.

The AMD mobile chips are right there with M3 for battery life and have excellent performance only I couldn't find a complete system which shipped with the same size battery as the MBP16. They're either half or 66% of the capacity.

> and Apple are complete crooks wrt honouring warranties

Huh? I've used AC for both MBP and iPhones a number of times over the years, and never had an issue. They are known for some of the highest customer ratings in the industry.

They claimed that it wasn't covered because the machine was brought in Germany. I live in The Netherlands and brought it here. Also I contacted Apple Support to checked my serial number and then gave me the address to take it to. Which I did.

They charged me $100 to get my machine back without repair.

Also bear in mind that the EU is a single market, warranties etc are, by law, required to be honoured over the ENTIRE single market. Not just one country.

Especially when the closest Apple Store to me is IN GERMANY.

I have since returned it to Amazon who will refund it (they're taking their sweet time though, I need to call them next week as they should have transferred already).

So you haven't purchased it from Apple but instead you've purchased it from Amazon. This may change things. In Europe you have two ways of dealing with it, either by manufacturer warranty (completely good will and on terms set by the manufacturer) or by consumer rights (warranted you by law, overruling any warranty restrictions).

Sellers often will try to steer you to use warranty as it removes their responsibility, Amazon is certainly shady here. Apple will often straight on give you a full refund or a new device (often newer model), that happened to me with quite few iPhones and MacBooks.

Know your rights.

Amazon helped instantly however my mistake was talking to Apple. They didn't even ask if I'd spoken to the retailer. I was, at the time, focused on just getting it fixed as I needed to get the data off of it (the entire Apple + external monitors thing is also a shit-show, terrible UX, terrible design and terrible documentation).

I'll keep buying from Amazon as their support is great and prices competitive. I don't trust Apple buying from them directly.

I had a Macbook Pro 2018 that a friend of mine bought for me in Moscow because it was much cheaper there (due to grey import, I think). I didn't have Apple Care or anything. When its touchbar stopped working in 2020, I brought it to Apple Store in Amsterdam and complained about it and also about faulty butterfly keys (one keycap fell off, "t" and "e" key were registering double presses each time). So the guys at Apple Store simply took it and replaced the whole top case so I've got a new keyboard, new touchbar, and - the best part - a new battery.

10 years ago, the Genius Bar would fix my problem to my satisfaction in almost no time -- whether or not I had Apple Care. They'd send it off for repair immediately or fix it in less than an hour. 2 out of 3 iPhone 6 that had an issue, they just handed me a new device.

Today, Apple wastes my time.

Instead of the old experience of common sense, today the repair people apparently must do whatever the diagnostic app on the iPad says. My most recent experience was spending 1.5 hours to convince the guy to give me a replacement Airpods case. Time before that was a screen repair where they broke a working FaceID ... but then told me the diagnostics app told them it didn't work, so they wouldn't fix it.

I'm due for another year of AppleCare on my MBP M1, and I'm leaning towards not re-upping it. Even though it'd be 1/20th of the cost of a new one, I don't want to waste time arguing with them anymore.

That was before the Tim Cook bean counter takeover. Apple used to be generous with accessories and stuff before too. Now they even remove stickers to save a few cents per device.

Apple still makes good hardware but the scrooge attitude is disgusting for such premium products.

I would go multiple routes with Apple if you're able. They tend to be pretty good with in warranty and even out of warranty.

Is that in performance, or performance while matching thermals?

If a competing laptop has to run significantly hotter/louder than in my mind that’s not on par.

For many workloads I think they are pulling definitely ahead. However, I think there is still much to gain in software. For example, my Linux/Fedora desktop with 5900X is many times more responsive than my 16” M1 Pro.

Java runs faster. GraalVM native generated native images run way waster. Golang runs faster. X86_64 has seen more love from optimalisations than aarch64 has. One of the things I hit was different GC/memory performance due to different page sizes. Moreover, docker runs natively on Linux, and the network stack itself is faster.

But even given all of that, the 16” M1 PRO edges close to the desktop. (When it is not constrained by anti virus.) And it does this in a portable form factor, with way less power consumption. My 5900X tops out at about 180W.

So yes, I would definitely say they are pulling ahead.

I suspect that’s an OS issue. Linux is simply more optimized and faster at equivalent OS stuff.

Which isn’t too surprising given a lot of the biggest companies in the world have been optimizing the hell out of it for their servers for the last 25+ years.

On the flipside of the coin though Apple also clearly optimizes their OS for power efficiency. Which is likely paying some good dividends.

For sure, the networking is on the OS level because in both I’m using the tcp stack provided by the OS. (Also GUI in Linux has less transitions and feels snappier in general.)

The remainder can be attributed to compiler optimisations or lack thereof.

The M1 was a complete surprise, it was so far ahead that it was ridiculous.

The M2-4 are still ahead (in their niche), but since the M1, Intel and AMD have been playing catchup.

Or more accurately AMD is playing catch up with the Strix series, while Intel seems too busy shooting themselves in the foot to bother.

There have always been higher performing x64 chips than the M series but they use several times more power to get that.

Apple seems to be reliably annihilating everyone on performance per watt at the high end of the performance curve. It makes sense since the M series are mobile CPUs on ‘roids.

Irony being that’s the same thing Intel learned from the P4.

They gave it up for Core, grown from their low power chips, which took them far further with far less power than the P4 would have used.

Since power is the limiting factor due to heat, optimize for power first then scale up.

TSMC is running away from the competition