[hajile]

PC laptops with similar build quality cost the same or more.

x86 machines only compete when you don’t consider power consumption (which really matters for laptops). It’s so bad that most top end x86 machines won’t even try to hit those peak numbers unless the machine is plugged in and then only for short periods of time.

My M1 beats most x86 machines even after it throttles and it’s over three years old now. My M3 Max machine blows away the x86 machines I run into and it does it while still having good battery life.

[yywwbbn]

> My M1 beats most x86 machines even after it throttles and it’s over three years old now

I doubt that. Last gen Intel/AMD cpus are pretty fast these days.

[hajile]

There are a few points here.

1. Most x86 machines aren't running the fastest CPUs. They are running U-series CPUs and usually aren't even running the best U-series CPUs. H-series laptops are relatively rare.

2. Even U-series machine have a peak power consumption north of 50 watts. H-series CPUs peak out at over 3x that (157w for Intel 13/14th gen HX CPUs). There's simply no way to disperse that much energy with the small heatsinks available (even in a gaming laptop).

3. Most of these machines downclock massively when not plugged in.

4. The laptop size required for an H-series CPU is massive.

Putting all of that together, an M1 machine is simply faster than most x86 laptops because they contain low-binned, U-series CPUs. For the small fraction that contain H-series CPUs, My M1 is still generally faster if both machines are being used as laptops rather than bad desktops. This performance delta gets even bigger if the workload sustains enough that the x86 machines begin to throttle because they can't sustain the insane peak power draw.