[ucm_edge]

I notice the article only has base power draw in it. I’d want to know max TDP before anything gets crowned. This AMD is 15 watt base, the M2 is about 20 watts.

When the M1 came out, Intel announced chips that would crush and crush it they did, while drawing significantly more power. Intel announced with a 45 watt base TDP which didn’t look too far off the M1 Max, but the 12th Intels ended up peaking at 115 watts for the 12900HK.

It basically came down to if you were looking for something portable but would be plugged in when in use, the Intel offering was superior. If you wanted battery life, the Apple product remained superior.

Competition is good and hopefully AMD remains power competitive, but given a 7800 runs around 88 watts in normal use conditions and has 120 watt max budget, I would expect that performance AMD is touting to come with higher power draw.

[ben-schaaf]

The 6850U had a peak of 35W (https://www.phoronix.com/review/amd-ryzen7-6850u/8). Around the same as the M2 Max apparently.

[ucm_edge]

Sadly at about about half the Geekbench 5 score. M2 is single core 2061, multicore 15281. 6850U has single 1469 and multi 7365 scores. M2 is also ahead in Cinebench R23 and splits the single and multi in R20 with the 6850U.

To go from that to 70% ahead on multicore would be amazing because it would force Intel and Apple to respond.

The cynic in me, having watched Intel and AMD fight for the desktop crown post Ryzen launch though is skeptical that the scores are some combo pushing power limits to rather undesirable levels and extremely selective benchmarking (It's 70% better at this one thing).

[coffeebeqn]

Don’t forget they just announced Z1 for Steam Deck like machines (and Aerith for steam deck). They’re certainly not not in the game for low TDP. AMDs little GPUs are also much more capable at gaming because they get the decades of AMD experience and software in that space. M1 can maybe run a few games

[saltcured]

I confess to not really pay attention to the Apple ecosystem. Does anyone know enough about these benchmarks and chips to really know what is going on here? Is this straight up a difference in conventional superscalar/multicore throughput and efficiency?

Or are is there an aspect of Apple to non-Apple comparison here with the compiler, OS, and library ecosystem? I.e. do any of the benchmark calculations get executed off CPU in the GPU or other "matrix" coprocessing units in the Apple SoC? I am only interested in comparing CPU to CPU or GPU to GPU, but would want to exclude software-based differences like different compilers or support libraries.

[giantrobot]

The M1 has a lot of ALUs, an 8-wide instruction decoder, and a huge reorder buffer. It can decode and execute a lot of instructions on every clock and plenty of space to execute them in an advantageous order. Ignoring power draw, Intel and AMD beat the Mx then they hit higher clock speeds, the Mx top out at 3GHz, and/or pack in more P-cores.

[rgrs]

But AMD doesnt package everything in one big die.

[trympet]

Is that directly relevant to the consumer? The M1 architecture seems to be fairly sustainable. Intel, not so much.

[nightski]

It is, because I can buy a framework laptop w/ 64GB ram, 2 TB SSD and these latest Ryzen chips for half the cost of a macbook pro with similar addons.

[bhj]

That 64GB RAM isn’t also VRAM though. Not exactly a direct comparison.

[efficax]

half? not likely

[olliej]

I think we can’t make claims about “fairly sustainable” until it’s been around for more than two releases.

[rgrs]

It is relevant to the benchmarks which are used in ads

[AmVess]

There's no way AMD is going to make up that much ground in such a short amount of time. You will end up being correct in that AMD will be faster in one or two cherry-picked benchmarks. I will add these benchmarks will have zero relevance to anything regarding actual CPU power, and AMD will be greatly lacking in real performance.

[zamalek]

> There's no way AMD is going to make up that much ground

What facts do you base this assertion on? Do you have insider access to the benchmark results? Maybe wait for the benchmark results before coming to Apple's rescue. Remember that it wasn't so long ago that AMD schooled Intel so hard that their CEO fell off.

[rowanG077]

Benchmarks of the 7840U are out. You can see for yourself it doesn't beat the M2.

[zamalek]

I can't seem to find them, all I can't find are references to AMDs promise. Could you provide your source?

[goosedragons]

There's already Geekbench 5 scores of the 8 core 7840U up from devices like the Aokzoe A1 Pro with scores around 1900 in single core and 10K in multicore. The M2 scores mentioned above are for the 12 core M2 Max. The Aokzoe is a Steam Deck like handheld too so a larger chassis might allow for a little more out of the chip.

[fbdab103]

I clearly need to invest in a new NUC. I have some anemic Celeron build that supposedly draws 10-20 W, but the performance is laughably bad. If these "real" chips have such low max draws, they should be able to fit within my informal <20W idle envelope, but still provide performance when needed.

[Andys]

Check out these systems based on AMD laptop chips - https://www.servethehome.com/beelink-ser6-pro-7735hs-edition...

Idle at 6-7W, but a full-powered multi-core CPU when you need it. Plus USB4 and 32 or 64GB RAM.

[brigade]

Even max TDP doesn't correlate well to energy efficiency in normal usage. Like, this chip could never use more than 15W and still be less energy efficient, if lightly threaded workloads clock up to drain the full 15W.

Which a boost clock of 5.1GHz strongly suggests might happen.