It's been really weird reading laptop reviews over the last few months. I've seen a bunch of reviews where they have their usual bar graphs comparing a bunch of laptops, and the laptop that is at the bottom is an Apple. It's the really inexpensive Neo, of course, but even the M5 laptops are consistently beat on performance and battery life by Intel Windows laptops.
I assume the M6 will take the crown back and then a few months later Intel/AMD will release a new chip and take that crown back again. That's the state of the world we used to expect, but it's a state that has been missing ever since the release of the M1 in 2020 until Intel finally caught up again this year.
> even the M5 laptops are consistently beat on performance and battery life by Intel Windows laptops.
When plugged in... This caveat is so enormous it should almost be legislated. If your computer use is at all portable, a computer that scales down to 20 - 40% of GPU power when unplugged is an enormously significant factor. So far as I'm aware (could be wrong about arm devices?) there's no non-apple laptop that operates at 100% speed on the road.
Newer Intel Panther Lake chips perform the same or very similarly on battery as they do when plugged in - as do Qualcomm chips. However, I don't know where they're seeing "consistently beat on performance and battery life by Intel Windows laptops". Multi-core performance can definitely beat M5 in some configurations but single core performance is still fairly far behind and battery life is comparable again depending on the exact specifications and design of the laptop. I've seen analysis showing M5 is still the perf/watt king though regardless of configurations.
Sorry, poor wording. It's the Neo that's on the bottom in many reviews, but the M5 is regularly beaten by Windows laptops. My usage of "consistently" was in the sense of regularly beaten, not in the sense of always beaten.
Because the naming convention was used for chips based on Skylake microarchitecture (but with other differences such as process node). Not changing the name implies they've either changed the naming convention (why?) or they haven't improved the microarchitecture since 2012.
> but even the M5 laptops are consistently beat on performance and battery life by Intel Windows laptops
The real question is whether all these Intel Windows laptops spin their fans at full speed when doing absolutely nothing. That’s something I can never go back to. I do some light gaming on my M2 Pro MBP and it gets hot when trying to push 120 fps. But my Lenovo Legion (that’s now collecting the dust) is so loud I could hear it through headphones.
Yeah, as a somewhat new MacBook air user I'm also sceptical when people claim that any windows laptop is now better or at least as good as a MacBook.
I'm still traumatized by my windows laptop randomly turning on in my backpack, heating itself up and draining the battery because of windows.
Aside from that I'm now used to MacOS for my daily needs aside from gaming so windows laptop have to do a lot of work convincing me of getting back to them.
Those Windows laptops always have a dealbreaker for me (besides Windows itself). If they have decent screens, sound, and battery life then the trackpad or keyboard will suck. If it's cheap it'll creak and groan like a Tesla interior...and have a terrible trackpad.
> [...] but even the M5 laptops are consistently beat on performance and battery life by Intel Windows laptops.
Hold up, in what metric/benchmark? Feel personally like we life in an age where, no matter the SOC vendor, something high performant and efficient is offered, so seeing a claim that any vendor, be it Intel, AMD, Qualcomm or Apple, is consistently outperforming another, I'd like to get more context on that.
Intel were x86, Apple Silicon is ARM-based. ARM-based chips are more power-efficient.
Also, it's built on a much smaller process. 3nm, if I'm not mistaken, older Intel was something bigger than 10nm. Heck, if you take a really old Intel Mac, you have something like 65nm process, which is much less efficient than 3nm.
> It's the really inexpensive Neo, of course, but even the M5 laptops are consistently beat on performance and battery life by Intel Windows laptops.
Of course you can beat the entry level MacBook Neo by comparing it to larger, more powerful, more expensive laptops.
The M5 is an entire family with a range of performance. Intel/AMD have done a lot to improve performance but they’re not beating the high end M5 chips on performance or battery life yet.
It's also not hard to find a Windows laptop that beats the M5 on battery life. Single-thread performance is the only remaining measure where the M5 is king.
x86 is way more complex when compared to ARM processors, as a result their TDP is way higher when you request performance from them.
Intel had to reduce the frequency of their processors when running AVX2 instructions and the AVX2 frequency of the processors were non-disclosable to anyone.
Also, benchmarking Intel processors and publishing these numbers were forbidden in some cases. I don't know whether this ban is still in effect.
x86 processors can't keep up with the ARM processors TDP and thermal profile wise. So they slow down a ton when running on battery. See Jeff Geerling's last video on Apple Neo vs. some Intel laptop. It's as "efficient", but slow as a newborn tortoise learning to walk when unplugged and trying to get the most endurance out of the battery.
My M1 Mac gets almost 2 days of low-intensity use after ~6 years of use, and it got warm once or twice because something ran away in the background for tens of minutes.
It doesn't really matter, because x86 processors inside are almost similar to modern ARM processors, the instructions that most programs use are more or less the same, and more complex "legacy" instructions are just emulated by splitting them into simpler instructions inside the CPU.
To me people that say that x86 is slow etc. never used an x86 processor with anything other than Windows. Yes, Windows is shit and laptops that run Windows are for the same reason shit. I get it. But on an x86 system you can run other OS, and, for example, a Linux distro with well tweaked power consumption parameters can get you even 3 days of battery life, or even more.
The point is that Windows keeps almost always the CPU above the minimum frequency, because it's full of useless background services, because programs are not well optimized for the hardware (to maximize backward compatibility they don't compile target x86_64 v3 for example and thus don't leverage on features and instructions available on new CPU or fall in the emulation case I've mentioned initially), and other reasons.
With a Linux distro you can keep the CPU at 600Mhz while web browsing, you can even turn off cores that you don't need, and the battery with this configuration surely lasts ages (at that point it becomes more predominant the consumption of other peripherals such as the display).
Being mistaken on the CISC vs RISC debate (besides, modern x86 is closer to RISC via micro-ops then old school CISC) is understandable. There is a lot of misinformation out there and myths, plus, it just feels right to consider CISC overly burdened, etc. TLDR: Intel x86_64 is closer to RISC then you likely think and Apple Silicon arm is closer to CISC then you likely think. These lines are blurry and have been for decades, very much for good reason.
> But talking this authoritatively on something without doing the reading, that's grating...
Thanks for your prejudice on me without knowing anything about me. In short, I'm a HPC sysadmin and programmer who works in a HPC center, separated from the actual hardware by a couple of floors.
We can discuss how transistors' heat generation doesn't discern about ISAs or being in a DAC or a cutting edge microprocessor, and we can even discuss how implementation of some functional blocks generate heat regardless of the ISA being involved. If you want we can discuss how saturating memory controllers affect pipeline saturation in processors even...
But talking this authoritatively on something with that amount of prejudice, that's grating.
Because being too confident about someone you don't know is a bad habit. Where I work doesn't matter though, but what I do is.
Pointing me to C&C is a nice touch though. Not only I read the site and very article you sent me before, I used to consume Anandtech before that.
As a mere mortal, I can make mistakes and gladly accept them, but I can't accept rude replies. Pardon my French, but being called a low-key liar or smoke blower gets me a little upset.
> Pointing me to C&C is a nice touch though. Not only I read the site and very article you sent me before, I used to consume Anandtech before that.
All I'll say is, that's worse then. Presuming you had not read up before promoting a long disproven myth, that was an assumption by me, I'll admit that and maybe I should not have done that, my mistake. But it was a gracious mistake, it was done in your favour, it was giving you credit.
I assume the M6 will take the crown back and then a few months later Intel/AMD will release a new chip and take that crown back again. That's the state of the world we used to expect, but it's a state that has been missing ever since the release of the M1 in 2020 until Intel finally caught up again this year.