[n7pdx]

LOL yeah. More powerful, i.e. it consumes more power. Fun fact: the M1 big core caps itself around the same wattage where most Intel SKU consider the core to be below stock wattage. As in, in order to achieve your “more powerful” claim, it takes Intel cores 2-7x the watts, depending on the workload, to eek out a marginal performance uplift… or sometimes just to match the M1.

Nobody in CPU design cares about unconstrained power performance. Even at Intel, they never use the PL2 power level as the design landing zone. All modeling is done at much lower power target, even below PL1.

That is to say: unconstrained power performance is not an engineering effort, it is a marketing and SKU differentiation effort. Your “more powerful” statement is a matter of how much power Intel/Apple/AMD/whoever is willing to shove into their piece of silicon, which in turn dictates the form factors and customers they can try to satisfy.

Apple only needs a few watts per big core and still get the peak perf it needs, and put that chip in all the form factors it sells. Obviously if M1 sucked down the kind of power as any Intel chip, it cannot go into an iPad, or a fanless macbook air, without totally compromising performance.

Intel on the other hand needs grossly more watts to hit that same performance, and therefore is losing badly on form factors that care about power: laptops and servers. Some form factors/customers just don’t care, which is why Intel cooks up marketing targeting the gamer market, or the 8-pound laptop market. That’s all fine, just don’t pretend Intel is not getting absolutely hammered on the CPU technical specs for the money-making markets that matter.

BTW, the DIY gamer CPU market does not matter. The 8-pound laptop market does not matter.

[adam_arthur]

Ok, so when Intel and AMD get on 5nm equivalents and their chips are both more powerful and efficient than the 5nm Apple chips, you'll issue a mea culpa here, right?

The fanboyism runs so deep it's amazing. Let's compare PS5 to GameCube next and talk about Sony's great engineering advantage

[n7pdx]

And when it doesn’t, will you apologize for calling everyone else a fanboy because they don’t buy into your excuses?

Go compare the perf/power curves of the alder-lake cores (both P/E) versus the last-gen Apple cores from TSMC n7+. TSMC n7+ is roughly comparable to Intel 10nm ESF in transistor performance, so it is a fair comparison.

Do your research then get back to me about how the process is entirely responsible for every perf/power difference and we (the silicon design teams) are just identical robots doing the same thing across the board in every company.

I do like how you claim there is no design magic sauce, but then Apple will lose big when Intel/AMD come out with their 5nm equivalents, as in, they found some magic sauce? WTF?