[sm_1024]

IMO, the most interesting thing about this line is the battery life---within an hour of MBP3 and within 2 hours of Asus's Qualcomm. Making it comparable to ARM architectures.

Which is a little surprising because ARM is commonly believed to be much more power efficient than x86.

[1] https://youtu.be/Z8WKR0VHfJw?si=A7zbFY2lsDa8iVQN&t=277

[arnaudsm]

ARM got a lot of hype since the release of the M1, but most users only compared it to the terrible Intel MBPs. Ryzen mobile has been consistently close to Apple silicon perf/watt for 5 years. But got little press coverage.

Hype can be really decorrelated from real world performance.

[jsheard]

Any efficiency comparison involving Apples chips also has to factor in that Tim Cook keeps showing up at TSMCs door with a freight container full of cash to buy out exclusive access to their bleeding edge silicon processes. ARM may be a factor but don't underestimate the power of having more money than God.

Case in point, Strix Point is built on TSMC 4nm while Apple is already using TSMCs second generation 3nm process.

[carstenhag]

But how is this the case? I never saw a single article mentioning that a non-Mac laptop was better.

(Random article saying M3 pro is better than a Dell laptop https://www.tomsguide.com/news/macbook-pro-m3-and-m3-max-bat... )

[sm_1024]

I have heard that part of the reason for little coverage of ryzen mobile CPUs is their limited availability as AMD was focussing on using the fab capacity for server chips.

[sandywaffles]

I think that's because all the press talks about actual battery life per laptop and the Apple Silicone laptops ship with literally double the size battery of any AMD based laptop without a discrete GPU. So while the efficiency may be close, actually perceived battery life of the Mac will he more than double when you also consider the priority Apple puts into their power control combined with a larger overall battery.

[Filligree]

Ryzen mobile is consistently close, yeah. But with the sole exception of the Steam deck, I've yet to see a Ryzen mobile-bearing laptop, Windows included, which is close to the overall performance of the Macbook.

[dagmx]

Battery tests are important, but so is how it fairs on battery (what is the performance drop off to maintain that), what’s its performance is ant its peak and how it long before it throttles when pushed.

The M series processors have succeeded in all four: battery life, performance parity between battery and plugged in, high performance and performance sustainability.

So far, very few benchmarks have been comparing the latter three as part of the full package assessment.

[jiggawatts]

> because ARM is commonly believed to be much more power efficient than x86.

Because most ARM processors were designed for mobile phones and optimised to death for power efficiency.

The total power usage of the front end decoders is a single digit percentage of the total power draw. Even if ARM magically needed 0 watts for this, it couldn’t save more power than that. The rest of the processor design elements are essentially identical.

[Panzer04]

>5hr Battery life in laptops is mostly a function of how well idle is managed, i think. The less work you can do while running the users core program, the better. I'm not sure how much impact CPU efficiency really has in that case.

If you are running a remotely demanding program (say, a game) , your battery life will be bad no matter what (ie. <4hrs) unless you choose a very low TDP that performs badly always.

A laptop at idle should be able to manage ~5w power consumption sumtpion regardless of AMD/intel/Apple processor, but it's largely on the OS to achieve that.

[999900000999]

I have a 365 AMD laptop.

The battery is great if your doing very light stuff, Call of Duty takes it's battery down to 3 hours.

Macs don't really support higher end games, so I can't directly compare to my M1 Air.

[sedatk]

How does “great” translate to hours?

[wtallis]

The CPU core's instruction set has no influence on how well the chip as a whole manages power when not executing instructions.

[sm_1024]

That is fair, I was taught that decoders for x86 are less efficient and more power hungry than RISC ISAs because of their variable length instructions.

I remember being told (and it might be wrong) that ARM can decode multiple instructions in parallel because the CPU knows where the next instruction starts, but for x86, you'd have to decode the instructions in order.

[IshKebab]

Sure, but it's not idle power consumption that's the difference between these.

[double0jimb0]

I didn’t watch this link, but my Zenbook S 16 only gets remotely close to my M2 MBA battery life if the zenbook is in whatever is Windows 11 ‘efficiency’ mode, and then it benchmarks at 50% of the M2.

I don’t think the two are remotely comparable in perf/watt.

[cubefox]

Unlike AMD and Qualcomm, Apple uses an expensive TSMC 3nm process, so you would expect better battery life from the "MBP3". I assume they used the process improvements to increase performance instead.

[hajile]

Perf per watt is higher for M1 on N5 vs Zen5 on N4P, so the problems go deeper than just process.

X Elite also beats AMD/Intel in perf/watt while being on the same N4P node as HX370.

https://www.notebookcheck.net/AMD-Zen-5-Strix-Point-CPU-anal...

[GrumpyYoungMan]

The display, RAM, and other peripherals are consuming power too. Short of running continuous high CPU loads, which most people don't do on laptops, changes in CPU efficiency have less apparent effect on battery life because it's only a fraction of overall power draw.

[acchow]

> within an hour of MBP3

Not a good way to measure. The Zenbook S16 has a larger 78Wh battery vs the MacBook Pro’s 69.6Wh.

So that’s 11% less battery life despite 12% more battery capacity.

[halJordan]

Yeah if you make a worse core and then downclock it then you will increase power efficiency. AMD thankfully only downclocks the 5c, but Intel is shipping ivy lake equivalents in their flagship products just to get power efficiency up.