[acdha]

It’s not as simple as seeing 15W and saying the thermal load is the same: they don’t have constant usage so you have to compare the actual power usage for workloads you care about. Some manufacturers are more conservative so you need uncommon combinations to hit the maximum output whereas other chips will approach that in normal usage.

This is also where design decisions matter: for example, a while back I measured hashing performance for some boxes which needed to check data integrity and an Intel chip handily lost despite being faster on everything else because the embedded processor I was comparing it to had dedicate SHA hardware which was both faster and more power efficient than a generic x86 implementation. That’s ancient history now but I would expect Apple to aggressively explore opportunities to improve their stack like that since they control it at every level - for example, I believe benchmarks have shown Objective-C message passing is considerably faster on M1.

[qayxc]

Optimising applications for specific hardware has nothing to do with the hardware manufacturer if the software and hardware come from different suppliers, though.

Apple has the advantage of developing and deploying hardware, OS and system software completely in-house.

AMD only supplies chips and basic firmware, both of which can be configured by OEMs/ODMs and the OS and software come from entirely different parties again.

So the usage profile depends on external factors, not just the CPU itself. In the end, however, a 15W power budget is a 15W power budget and an M1 under full load and a Ryzen under full load will have the same thermal output if configured the same (as far as power consumption goes).

How well the waste heat is managed is not in the hands of the CPU.

[acdha]

Your position appears to be conflating requiring coordination with impossibility. Apple has it easier in some ways but it’s not like AMD/Intel, Microsoft, Dell, et al. don’t work together, too. Similarly, while you’re not entirely wrong that the ISVs customize firmware and settings, the defaults and range of options are constrained by the CPU design.

Finally, again, 15W TDP is not the same as 15W under normal usage. That misunderstanding appears to be driving most of your disagreements in this thread.

[qayxc]

> Finally, again, 15W TDP is not the same as 15W under normal usage. That misunderstanding appears to be driving most of your disagreements in this thread.

No. The CPUs can be configured to consume no more than 15 Watts, even if few OEMs do so. Same goes for the M1 - there's no difference with regards to this: both the MBP 13 and the Mac Mini have higher power limits and active cooling for that reason.

In fact, the latest U-series mobile Ryzen CPUs are even optimised to be most efficient at a 15W power level, contrary to Intel's Ice Lake chips, which get the most performance at a higher wattage configuration of 28 Watts.

[acdha]

Again, as a number of people corrected you, it's not a simple 15W figure but specifically the listed maximum 15W thermal design power (TDP).

That's a term in the industry with a specific meaning:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_design_power

The key thing to understand is that this is not measured power consumption while running the benchmarks and you cannot reliably compare the values even across the same product line, much less across chips — especially when we're talking about SoC designs where, for example, the TDP refers to the entire chip but the benchmarks being discussed are all CPU-focused and don't even exercise the GPU at all. We also know that TDP numbers are not a hard ceiling: there are some chips which under some conditions — most commonly but not always synthetic benchmarks — will exceed those figures, possibly by somewhat significant margins.

[qayxc]

OK. For the last time, here's a freakin' screenhot to illustrate the point: https://ibb.co/QYnj40r

What you see there is are the power limits of the CPU (as reported by HWInfo64).

If you set the POWER LIMIT in the UEFI/BIOS, this regulates THE POWER consumption of the chip. NOTHING to do with TDP.

Why is that so hard to grasp for you? You can even measure the power rom the wall to confirm this. I am NOT talking about TDP here!