It’s still far from clear that ARM for Windows will be going anywhere. And Intel is trying to increase ISA diversification with their foundry business.
I've seen reviews of the latest 13 inch Dell XPS and it's both more powerful and less energy hungry than the M3 in a MacBook air. It uses the Snapdragon Elite X ARM cpu.
It also blows the latest mobile i7 ultra 155H on the same XPS 13 in performance while lasting almost 20 hours (compared to Intel's 6).
The comparisons are made on software that runs on both (Geekbench, handbrake) but it's clear that there is a huge momentum building for windows on arm.
There's way more to ARM adoption than simply power consumption.
When apple went to the M1, they got their entire software ecosystem to go along with the migration. That's the fundamental strength of Apple. They can do things like kill standards at will.
Microsoft can't necessarily do the same thing for the vast library and catalog of x86 software.
MT is one thing but in ST it’s still simply not even close. Even the Qualcomm SDXE pulls fully 15w less than AMD, and apple pulls 10w less than Qualcomm.
60w peak power consumption for a literal single thread. 35w average.
We simply aren’t going to see x86 get to the subjective “apple experience” of a laptop that runs equally well on or off battery, with day-long life during interactive low-intensity usage, until x86 vendors can get their single-thread power consumption under control. Platform power is part of it (although external-monitor tests minimize most of the usual factors) but x86 simply isn’t competitive in performance terms unless it’s boosting excessively high in power terms. At least not right now.
I know Keller said it only matters 20% or so, but… right now we are objectively in a world where x86 is using ~triple the power in 1T workloads. The x86 is fine when it can exploit SMT and the workloads are heavily numeric/vector oriented, they simply aren’t very good at single-threaded workloads where there is no SMT to fill their pipeline bubbles.
And yes, race to sleep is all well and good. But apple can race to sleep on 1/3 the power. Apple can also have an icache and all that other crap too (m1 has an icache six times as big as its x86 competitors). At the end of the day the x86 results are still objectively poorer by literally several powers of 2. But Keller said everything is equally good therefore the evidence can be casually dismissed.
Even the much happier computerbase numbers only put this at 20w core power (and they’re using sensors, not actual measurements of course). And that still is power you have to pay on those laptops, even if it’s “platform power” - like, ok, so the defense of x86 here is that x86’s finest champion is spending more on platform power than the apple laptop uses at the wall for the whole laptop… by a factor of 50%. It then uses another 2x multiple of the apple laptop to do just the computation work.
> We simply aren’t going to see x86 get to the subjective “apple experience” of a laptop that runs equally well on or off battery, with day-long life during interactive low-intensity usage
I disagree. Apple themselves showed what you could do with an x86 processor in terms of battery life long before they went to ARM, and most manufacturers still aren’t even close. People have been talking about the amazing life in their products for ages before arm.
Meanwhile I can’t get my windows laptop to not burn itself up in my bag with an update, which also coincidentally uses a ton of battery power as the fans cool itself on full tilt
As an owner of an ice lake macbook I can tell you definitively that it’s still utter shit compared to the apple silicon ones. Best case scenario it idles at 14w system power, while my 2020 m1 mba idled at <5w and sometimes <3w at very long idle.
Usually if it’s not totally idle it idles at 22w. And again, this is the problem, light load produces quite a lot of power consumption on x86 compared to arm.
I bought it for the meme, it was a laugh and I wanted a late-gen x86 model with no dGPU to give x86 the best shot (mostly bought it for windows use actually). But the “it’s just macOS/optimization magic!!!” isn’t true either. x86 MacBooks still fucking suck, even the ones without the absolutely shit-tastic AMD dGPUs onboard. Those idle at closer to 50w if you have a display plugged in, btw. There’s no way to turn them off because the display outputs are hardwired to the gpu, if you are using an external display the dGPU is forced on. I tried, my old work MacBook was an i9 and it fucking sucked during the summer.
The idea that macOS is just uniquely lightweight and can somehow wring better perf/w out of computational tasks than Linux or windows just isn’t supportable either. Certainly if it were true it would also show up in MT and not just 1T loads. Reality is perf/w is mostly a constraint of the processor and not the OS… just like the OS can’t magically make applications use less ram and “turn 8gb into 16gb” either. It takes X cycles for Y processor to execute Cinebench and the OS does not matter that much in the big picture.
It maybe does help with sleep states and idle power, things like grand central scheduling. But 1T load is a load state, not idle.
> As an owner of an ice lake macbook I can tell you definitively that it’s still utter shit compared to the apple silicon ones. Best case scenario it idles at 14w system power
That really surprising since my 8th gen intel laptop (2 generations older than ice lake) idled at under 5W in Linux. So does my newer 12th gen intel laptop.
I would assume that’s packagd power and I mean total system power, using the “stats” cask with the average system power sensor.
I will play with it and see if I can get package power.
But the overall point is that even looking at total system power - the apple silicon is silly efficient. It’s actually meaningfully better than x86 in literally every way you choose to measure it.
I guess the Lunar Lake mobile CPUs will be more interesting than the Meteor Lake ones (e.g. 155H). But we'll see if they can keep the promises in regards to power consumption.
