Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by Numerlor 158 days ago
Lost faith from what? On x86 mobile Lunar lake chips are the clear best for battery life at the moment, and mobile arrowlake is competitive with amd's offerings. Only thing they're missing is a Strix halo equivalent but AMD messed that one up and there's like 2 laptops with it.

The new intel node seems to be kinda weaker than tsmc's going by the frequency numbers of the CPUs, but what'll matter the most in a laptop is real battery life anyway
1 comments
aurareturn 158 days ago
Lunar Lake throttles a lot. It can lose 50% of its performance on battery life. It's not the same as Apple Silicon where the performance is exactly the same plugged in or not.

Lunar Lake is also very slow in ST and MT compared to Apple.

Qualcomm's X Elite 2 SoCs have a much better chance of duplicating the Macbook experience.

link
Numerlor 158 days ago
Nobody is duplicating the macbook experience because Apple is integrating both hardware and os, while others are fighting Windows, and OEMs being horrible at firmware.

LNL should only power throttle when you go to power saver modes, battery life will suffer when you let it boost high on all cores but you're not getting great battery life when doing heavy all core loads either way. Overall MT should be better on Panther lake with the unified architecture, as afaik LNLs main problem was being too expensive so higher end high core count SKUs were served by mobile arrow lake. And we're also getting what seems to be a very good iGPU while AMD's iGPUs outside of Strix Halo are barely worth talking about

ST is about the same as AMD. Apple being ahead is nothing out of the ordinary since their ARM switch, as there's the node advantage, what I mentioned with the OS, and just better architecture as they plainly have the best people at the moment working at it

link
aurareturn 158 days ago
LNL throttles heavily even on the default profile, not just power saver modes.[0]

Meanwhile, Qualcomm's X Elite 1 did not throttle.

Lunar Lake uses TSMC N3 for compute tile. There is no node advantage. Yet, M4 is 42% faster in ST and M5 is 50% faster based on Geekbench 6 ST.

[0]https://www.pcworld.com/article/2463714/tested-intels-lunar-...

link
Numerlor 157 days ago
> LNL throttles heavily even on the default profile, not just power saver modes.

This does also show it not changing in other benchmarks, but I don't have a LNL laptop myself to test things myself, just going off of what people I know tested. It's still also balanced so best performance power plan would I assume push it to use its cores normally - on windows laptops I've owned this could be done with a hotkey.

> Lunar Lake uses TSMC N3 for compute tile. There is no node advantage.

LNL is N3B, Apple is on N3E which is a slight improvement for efficency

> Yet, M4 is 42% faster in ST and M5 is 50% faster based on Geekbench 6 ST.

Like I said they simply have a better architecture at the moment, which also more focused on client that GB benchmarks because their use cases are narrower. If you compare something like optimized SIMD Intel/AMD will come out on top with perf/watt.

And I'm not sure why being behind the market leader would make one lose faith in Intel, their most recent client fuckup was raptor lake instability and I'd say that was handled decently. For now nothing else that'd indicate Windows ARM getting to Apple level battery performance without all of the vertical integration

ETA: looking at things the throttling behaviour seems to be very much OEM dependent, though the tradeoffs will always remain the same

link
aurareturn 156 days ago 

  This does also show it not changing in other benchmarks, but I don't have a LNL laptop myself to test things myself, just going off of what people I know tested. It's still also balanced so best performance power plan would I assume push it to use its cores normally - on windows laptops I've owned this could be done with a hotkey.
It literally throttles in every benchmark shown. Some more than others. It throttles even more than the older Intel SoC LNL replaced.

  LNL is N3B, Apple is on N3E which is a slight improvement for efficency
Still the same family. The difference is tiny. Not nearly enough to make up the vast difference between LNL and M4. Note that N3B actually has higher density than N3E.

  Like I said they simply have a better architecture at the moment, which also more focused on client that GB benchmarks because their use cases are narrower. If you compare something like optimized SIMD Intel/AMD will come out on top with perf/watt.
LNL doesn't even have AVX512.
link