| > The Ryzen setup has twice the ram CPU micro benchmarks aren't typically affected by memory quantity, especially at these levels. > The Ryzen setup has twice the cpu cores The Ryzen chip has eight homogeneous cores, the M2 has eight heterogeneous cores. [0] All else being equal, having high performance and low power cores in the same package _should_ result in better performance and efficiency. I do note that the machine specs in the article show the M2 as having 4c/8t, so I wonder if there's an SMP issue in Asahi on the M2 currently? They don't make it clear if this is the case, or why all eight cores aren't being reported/used. Doing some preliminary searching, it seems the M2 doesn't employ SMT, so perhaps this is misreported, or Asahi does something weird with scheduling. > The Ryzen setup has 3x the power envelope (in watts) as the M2
> Ryzen 46w (not sure if this includes the GPU) The 6850U is reported by the manufacturer as having a configurable TDP of 15-28W [1]. I believe this is total package power usage, so using either the CPU or GPU would allow better performance than maxing out both, and this probably applies to both chips. Some board/laptop manufacturers will also extend these limits, especially when plugged in, and design their cooling solutions to handle the increased power usage accordingly. Intel, for example, has published a TDP of 125W for some chips that can consume up to 230W while boosting [2]. I'm curious what both of these pull from the battery under load. I would expect the M2 to be more efficient, being manufactured on a newer, denser node. > They are using Asahi Linux on the M2. Any other comparison would be wholly meaningless. You (probably) can't run macOS on a Ryzen 6850U. Running benchmarks built by different compilers to run on different kernels wouldn't really be comparing the same thing. In the end, this benchmark, while interesting, measures what it measures. The results should be taken with a grain of salt, and should not be extrapolated to predict the performance of other applications on these platforms. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_M2 [1] https://www.amd.com/en/products/apu/amd-ryzen-7-pro-6850u [2] https://www.anandtech.com/show/16495/intel-rocket-lake-14nm-... |