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by bfgoodrich 2040 days ago
"The 2080 Max-Q in my laptop is fairly underpowered"

The 2080 Max-Q only exists in ~$3000 gaming laptops. Poor battery life, 4lb+ laptops. There is no universe where that is "fairly underpowered" unless we've moved the goal posts to pretend that everyone is rolling with a GTX 3080 and anything less is unbearable. In the real world you have to go to the seriously compromised "gaming" tier to get better graphics performance.

"but in terms of raw power it's just not there"

That depends upon what we define as the destination. It in no way competes with dedicated gaming rigs, as I made clear. Not by a huge margin. It isn't going to be something a guy reviewing 300W, $1000 GPUs will care about. That isn't the target market.

But the vast majority of people don't having those gaming rigs. Laptops that have better GPUs are a _tiny_, minuscule component of the market. And if you actually use those dedicated GPUs, you'd better be plugged in.

So when we talk about "gaming" we get into a No True Scotsman thing (to repeat myself) where it isn't gaming unless it's someone playing Warzone at 120Hz at 4K. But a pretty heady number of users are doing things like Civilization, The Sims, Roblox, Minecraft, and similar gaming. The M1 can host that style of gaming with ease.

"thanks mostly to TSMC's 5nm process"

It's kind of interesting that we're at this point. Apple has made a pretty capable GPU, stellar CPU cores, stellar inference cores, among other remarkable hardware. It was pretty stellar at 7nm too. It's all being dismissed as the 5nm advantage. I don't think it's remotely so simple.

1 comments

The 2080 Max-Q only exists in ~$3000 gaming laptops. Poor battery life, 4lb+ laptops.

I have an ASUS Zephyrus G14.

1680g(3.7lb) as checked just a minute ago using a kitchen scale. I don't know about battery life because I capped the charging at 80% and it still lasts a whole day of normal usage if need be. MSRP ~$1,500 in the US.

I don't think it's remotely so simple.

If you compare it to the Ryzen 4xxx mobile CPUs it checks out - performance increase is roughly as expected given the difference in feature size.

A disclaimer on your battery life: that is doing literally nothing with the 2080. Effectively turning it off and carrying it around as an extra cost/weight for nothing.

Because the moment you use that 2080, your battery life will be South of 3 hours with a 100% charge and a factory new battery. You'll also have a jet engine fan and a leg burning device.

Which is the point.

I have a whole day on battery for normal usage, and competent gaming performance when I plug it in.

The M1 offers only one of these things.