AMD promises its new laptop chips will crush the Apple M2 and it’s got receipts

[tiffanyh]

How will this compare per watt?

The Apple M-series is 3x more performant per watt than anything else.

Perf Per Watt (bigger is better):

  M1          298
  M2          297
  AMD 5600U    90
  AMD 6800U    78
  Intel 1240P  64

https://www.notebookcheck.net/Apple-M2-SoC-Analysis-Worse-CP...

[binkHN]

For those just reading the comments, the article mentions the 7000 series chips and the numbers here reflect the prior generation.

[tssva]

The tdp for the m2 is 20 watts. The article mentions a 15 watt tdp for the AMD chip. We will have to wait to see when the chips are released but it appears performance per watt will be at a minimum competitive with the m2.

[AtlasBarfed]

M1/M2 is a big.little design isn't it? As in an ultra low power CPU for trivial tasks and it spins up heavyweight cores when the workload demands it?

I mean, 3x the performance per watt might be --lies-- --damn lies-- uh, benchmarks targeting the little CPU?

[out_of_protocol]

M1 value seems wrong, should be 407

Different test:

Cinebench R23 Multi Package Power Efficiency

M1 - 561 pts/watt

M2 - 433

AMD Ryzen 7 6800U - 374

Intel Core i5-1240P - 258

[AshamedCaptain]

If you cite notebookcheck, at least cite the article where they compare a processor of the same gen... https://www.notebookcheck.net/AMD-Ryzen-9-7940HS-analysis-Ze...

TLDR: The performance per watt gap is gone, but only when you compare at similar TDPs.

[taylodl]

And performance per watt is what (ha!) matters most on a laptop as users demand both - high performance and a long battery life.

[tfdvydhh]

Nice try, apple fanboy. Your number are for the prevoius gen.

[ucm_edge]

I notice the article only has base power draw in it. I’d want to know max TDP before anything gets crowned. This AMD is 15 watt base, the M2 is about 20 watts.

When the M1 came out, Intel announced chips that would crush and crush it they did, while drawing significantly more power. Intel announced with a 45 watt base TDP which didn’t look too far off the M1 Max, but the 12th Intels ended up peaking at 115 watts for the 12900HK.

It basically came down to if you were looking for something portable but would be plugged in when in use, the Intel offering was superior. If you wanted battery life, the Apple product remained superior.

Competition is good and hopefully AMD remains power competitive, but given a 7800 runs around 88 watts in normal use conditions and has 120 watt max budget, I would expect that performance AMD is touting to come with higher power draw.

[ben-schaaf]

The 6850U had a peak of 35W (https://www.phoronix.com/review/amd-ryzen7-6850u/8). Around the same as the M2 Max apparently.

[brigade]

Even max TDP doesn't correlate well to energy efficiency in normal usage. Like, this chip could never use more than 15W and still be less energy efficient, if lightly threaded workloads clock up to drain the full 15W.

Which a boost clock of 5.1GHz strongly suggests might happen.

[morkalork]

If you told my past self from the mid/late 2000s that the future chip wars would be between AMD and Apple, I would not have believed you at all!

[pavlov]

Maybe not so implausible? AMD had a good run with the Athlon/K7 and the K8. The latter was so successful that Intel was forced to adopt its 64-bit ISA. The Pentium 4 (NetBurst) was a dead end design, and Intel had to backtrack and build off their laptop CPUs that were based on the older Pentium Pro design.

Apple bought P.A. Semi in 2008, a company founded by Daniel Dobberpuhl of DEC Alpha fame. Clearly they had something brewing on the CPU front.

[Agathos]

It's the Alpha team all the way down (or actually their successors, by now).

DEC -> AMD (Dirk Meyer, Jim Keller)

DEC -> PA Semi -> Apple (Daniel Dobberpuhl)

[guidedlight]

With TSMC laughing all the way to the bank.

[klelatti]

Also pretty implausible in 1990 say that Arm would be the highest performing surviving RISC architecture [1].

[1] yes, I know ARM64 looks nothing like the ARM ISA of 1990.

[phendrenad2]

"What happened to Intel?"

"They focused on servers, uh, you know, like for http. Those are really big in the future"

"Oh, weird"

[rsynnott]

Really? IIRC the PPC970 (you could definitely debate to what extent this was Apple vs IBM, of course) and Athlon64 both handily beat Intel's stuff when they launched ~2003; it's just that they failed to maintain that lead.

[giantrobot]

"What, did AMD switch to PowerPC?!"

[erratic_chargi]

So does it mean a passively cooled laptop like MacBook Air?, I mean the M2 performance are good but what makes it attractive are battery life and fanless yet capable laptop.

[exabrial]

I can't believe how much we've been focused on core speed when memory bandwidth and latency has been such a huge issue... at least for my workloads. My stuff screams on a M1 Chip.

[wmf]

AMD and Intel have the same 128-bit LPDDR5-6400 as the M2.

[spixy]

I prefer option to upgrade RAM capacity over too high memory bandwidth

[freehorse]

_They will burn them all_

Seriously, I do not doubt the performance (I hope they do not melt their cpus and motherboards this time), but energy efficiency, which is important in laptops? I will believe it when I see it (by in depth reviews, not by what benchmarks companies release), considering the desktop ryzen 7000s got to a completely different direction. Intel had made some ridiculous energy efficiency claims in their last generation that were totally out of reality in practice.

[catchnear4321]

It will crush a year old chip. (By a little.)

Competition is great.

Clickbait is not.

[kmos17]

Great to see some competition coming but yeah sounds very clickbaity, it’s comparing the base M2 to what will apparently be the top of the line new AMD chip, instead of comparing it to the M2 max for example.

“ the Ryzen 7 7840U, the initial flagship APU of the new series, apparently offers 9% better 3D rendering performance, 14% better responsiveness, and a whopping 72% better multiprocessing performance than the standard M2

There will be four new chips: the aforementioned Ryzen 7 7840U, the midrange Ryzen 5 7640U and 7540U, and the affordable Ryzen 3 7440U “

Also they’re not going to win on the marketing front with that naming strategy. Just awful. M1/2 and Pro/Max are so much simpler. It’s like Intel’s naming, such a mess.

[jacooper]

> (By a little.)

> and a whopping 72% better multiprocessing performance than the standard M2

[sp332]

Oh and what's this year's fastest Apple Silicon chip?

[fbdab103]

Does anyone know the state of linux scheduling and efficiency cores? It is my understanding that part of what makes the Apple experience smooth is tight control over what processes get pinned to performance cores and enforcing background jobs remain as such.

For example, the Gnome indexer, tracker-miner, should only ever be allocated to background status.

[schaefer]

AMD doesn't have efficiency cores (yet). on the X86 side, only intel does (for now).

[Slackwise]

> After all, AMD already makes the chips that power our modern consoles, from the Nintendo Switch

Uh, the Switch is an NVIDIA Tegra SoC...

[webaholic]

Is there any article comparing benchmarks for the same power envelope between Apple and AMD/Intel laptops?

All I find are comparisons with the desktop parts.

[intellix]

The previous generation of laptops from Apple were so bad that I'll be vice-like gripping my M1 laptop hard before even looking at the benchmarks. Performance alone is such a bad metric to even mention cause I just think about being 15% throttled 99% of the time, having a huge WHIRRRRRR and only lasting about 1 hour.

God it still hurts so much

[api]

The thing to crush about the M chips is performance per watt, not raw performance. They are respectable chips performance wise but Intel and AMD have faster (but hotter) chips. But as far as I know there is still nothing that beats them for efficiency, at least for the high performance desktop and laptop oriented market.

[capableweb]

As long as you don't start counting watt/performance/price, as then usually AMD wins out as Apple does have "premium" pricing for most (if not all) of their products

[amluto]

I want this as a server. It has 20 PCIe lanes (not sure whether the integrated GPU uses any of them), so getting 4x NVMe plus 10 or even 25 GigE should be possible. Bonus points for a server platform like this that still has a battery.

[xracy]

Are they finally gonna adopt ARM? My understanding is a lot of the performance improvements from M2 is that improving efficiency for the x64 isa is hitting diminishing returns. We've optimized it pretty well, but there's also a lot of cruft, so you have to build subinstructions that hide your actual isa to keep it going.

Feels like the next big "easy" win for intel and amd would be to actually make the switch. (Easy in quotations, because I imagine the first few iterations would actually be a fair bit more work).

[bitL]

AMD should really stop with this crappy marketing and look at how many of their promises evaporated quickly once people tried their new products. Radeon fiascos all the time, alienating Threadripper users by false promises, blown up Ryzen 7k3Ds running on voltages from marketing materials, crappy x3D hybrid CCD architecture disadvantaging many workloads etc. Somebody should tell their marketing team something unpleasant but needed.

[berjin]

Even if were twice as performant as M2 the windows laptop companies would ruin it with their tacky plastic chassis and tiny little touchpad.

[rfoo]

Apple already ruined their laptops with the heavy-ish metal chassis. Even the new MacBook Air is ~1.24kg.

Windows laptop companies, please DO NOT follow suit! Though some of them already did so, sigh.

Please Apple, please just replace your shiny aluminum with plastic (or some better alloy) and make your fanless offering 1kg.

[kaycey2022]

A Macbook Air's computing power is good enough for me. Will the new AMD chips be able to compete with M2's battery life while offering similar or more computing power is the big question. Does WSL drain the windows battery faster? I don't think most of the people using Macbooks care about Cinebench or gaming performance.

[nimbius]

Not really surprising. The m2 is just the same concept as the amd apu, but with sleeker branding and marketing. Amd has been doing apu since 2011, ages longer than apple

The whole m2 hootenany on hn reminded me of when retina came out. Its just a fancy branding for a hidpi display. Nothing inherently special.

[brokenmachine]

Even though I hate Apple as a company, the one tech trend that they've championed that I'm all for is the quiet/fanless laptops.