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by mukundmr 823 days ago
I am finding it hard to come to terms with the power and thermal figures. The CPU draws 320watts and likes to operate at 100 degrees Celsius. The CPU uses adaptive boost technology to pull more power to get to the 100C temperature mark. Again, from the review, most enthusiast motherboards default to limits near 4096W of power and 512A of current.

Compared to house hold appliances, with 4000watts of power, you can run 3 microwaves (at 1200 watts), more than 5 refrigerators (at 800 watts), a reasonably sized central air conditioning unit (though 5KW models aren't that rare), etc.

These power and thermal figures make me wonder why Intel is not moving towards Apple's design philosophy behind the M1, M2, M3 series of chips.

8 comments

> Most enthusiast motherboards default to limits near 4096W of power and 512A of current.

No, that's just a way to set no upper limit. A very beefy desktop power supply is 1600W, and that's typically over-specced to handle brief surges of power.

Why are you comparing the absolutely most power hungry, performant chip meant for desktop use in workstations and gaming machines with a low powered ARM chip meant for laptops?

Intel makes laptop ships too and those don't use 100W.

Why does everyone these days hate consumer choice and market diversity so much?

>Why does everyone these days hate consumer choice and market diversity so much?

A lot of people got into CPU topics because Apple created their M1s and they think that ARM is some unparallelled thing that every1 must adopt and that Apple's design goals are most important (other market segments are irrelevant)

The extremely nonlinear scaling is what gets me.
You can get a Mac Pro "desktop tower/cheese grater" with M2. iMac too.
I9-14900KS and top AMD chips run laps around Apple chips.

They shouldn't even be compared since they target different audiences.

And? Those are still significantly slower than this chip on the benchmarks they can run.

Why do you need to pull in Apple so badly into this?

This bloviating is really getting tiring here - this is the most expensive, most highend chip that people put into gaming machines and their worstations. People who really want the maxiumum power no matter the cost or heat.

If you utter "laptop", "M", "ARM" in this context you're not the target market for this chip. That's OK. Not everything needs to be a medium powered laptop chip for browsing.

You can downvote me all you want, it does not matter. You can call all ARM chips "laptop" grade all you want. But this misrepresents how this arch is used in servers and desktop "PCs" right now. And thats the only point I want to make. ARM arch chips are not laptop only. Can they match the power of this new I9? No. But that wasn't my point.
You can get x86 chips designed for laptops in desktop form factors too.

It's not about Arm. All of Apple's M chips so far have been primarily designed for mobile use, and that strongly affects how the power usage scales. It makes a basic comparison of watts not very useful.

> All of Apple's M chips so far have been primarily designed for mobile use

There, you said it again. This is wrong - you hear Apple M chip and you think "laptop" primarily, but that is no longer true. Just as it would be to say ARM is primarily for smartphones. Now I don't want to talk about sales numbers, but the M chips in the Apple Studio and Mac Pro (and those used by other manufacturers in servers) are a different category than "laptop". For a quick shallow impression see: https://nanoreview.net/en/cpu-compare/intel-core-i9-14900k-v...

(nevermind it's the i9-14900K)

Again, the I9 is more powerful, but that doesn't make all of ARM or M a "laptop".

They have a broad line up.

The provide laptop chips, desktop, high-end enthusiast desktop and server chips.

Why should they just copy apple?!

Manufacturers try to reuse as much as possible for efficiency's sake but one size does not fit all. If you try to have the same underlying blocks powering your super low-power ultra-portables, as well as the high power server chips, and everything in between (including the monstrosity in the article) the definition of efficiency starts to need a very subjective understanding.
Not sure whether it was AMD or Asus but a few months ago Asus pushed a firmware update to their recent AMD motherboards preventing users from undervolting their CPU in the motherboard because it would fry the motherboard. I can't find the article now but it happened last year.
They do, check Lunar Lake
Because of PC gaming crowd - marketing of the bigger plays to them - nobody cares or understand IPC or power efficiency.

Apple had it easier with the switch to ARM - they use vague metrics like over 2 times faster without actually getting into benchmarking or technical details like the PC crowd does.

Apple's crowd is more tolerant to BS too.

See Apple still comparing M3 to M1 instead of comparing M3 to M2.

They will tell you "It's because M1 users are the most probable to upgrade" but nothing says Apple couldn't have compared to the M2 also.

That's the amount of copium one has to inhale when stuck to the whims of a single vendor.

> Apple's crowd is more tolerant to BS too.

> That's the amount of copium one has to inhale when stuck to the whims of a single vendor.

These are such weird things to add here. Your comment was a perfectly good criticism of the way Apple markets their M1/2/3 CPUs, but then you added that extra nonsense and just came off as someone who spent way too much time in a PC gaming culture war on Reddit that the rest of us don't really care about.

Please refrain from ad-hominem attacks as per HN guidelines.

As for Apple consumers being more susceptible to being deceived, it seems we'll have to agree to disagree on our opinions. At least I provided an example.

Your comment adds nothing.

They said the content of your comment was bad. That is significantly less "ad hominem" than your comment was.
Oddly that power draw is close to a ThreadRipper 7995wx with 96 cores on OEM systems
at 512A current you are capped somewhere around 750w.