No one else makes a laptop that has the power / thermal / battery / weight spec combination that Apple does, and none of them are ARM laptops, either.
To exceed the Apple M1 / M2 specs with anyone else’s hardware, you need to give up on other specs that matter greatly to those of us who care about things like that.
Oh. I forgot that power/thermal/weight is the only spec that matters.
The point is that not everyone cares as much about perf/watt and there are plenty of comparable computers which surpass Apple laptops in different areas.
Amongst other issues with this sort of nonsense benchmark:
1. Does not indicate the amount of power used during the compilation (again, no one has equivalent performance / watt as the Apple Silicon chips).
2. Does not report the speed of the disks involved.
3. Does not report the amount, type, and speed of the RAM involved.
4. Does not report anything about the compilation environment (cross-compiling, running in an x86 VM, running in any VM, etc.)
Are there faster computers than Apple Silicon computers? Yup. Are there faster computers that have the same power and thermal specs? It’s possible, but I have yet to see a single benchmark that reports anything close which is available to most people.
It’s not just laptops, BTW. Amazon Graviton 2 machines run in server farms that consume less power and are cooler than their x86 equivalents.
What prejudice? They are unmatched (AFAIK) in perf/watt. The original post that I replied to stated that there are no "acceptable or comparable" hardware. I think that's subjective but false. Comparable doesn't mean exactly the same. Similar is good enough. I take acceptable to mean usable. There are plenty of other usable machines.
Please recommend one (or more)! I want to buy a new laptop for years. Last time I got so fed up with the available ones I just bought two second hand laptops for cheap. A small XPS and a big Lenovo (as a backup and for compile heavy development work).
Dell XPS 13 with an UHD screen is the closest you can get.
Again, the problem is that the hardware and the software are not optimized to work well with each other as much as Mac hardware and MacOS. Dell's fingerprint sensors do not work on Linux due to undocumented specs, and sleep/suspend doesn't work (the laptop will overheat in your backpack)
This was the typical post on Slashdot in 2005, but one would hope to notice you can’t judge a computer by “specs” anymore, especially not one that runs on battery power. The different specs fight each other; you can’t just increase them all.
To exceed the Apple M1 / M2 specs with anyone else’s hardware, you need to give up on other specs that matter greatly to those of us who care about things like that.