I feel like the M1 hype is getting out of hand. Apple bought up TSMC’s entire 5nm manufacturing capacity so of course it’s going to pack more transistors and use less power than AMD’s 7nm TSMC process or Intel’s 10nm process (which is effectively similar to 7nm TSMC).
The M1 is a great and well-refined design but when compared to AMD’s similarly priced 4750U in multi core benchmarks, the performance per watt is better but not by much more than the improved process would suggest. And that’s without the IPC improvements that mobile Zen 3 will bring.
And when compared to last gen 14nm Intel MacBooks, a 5nm TSMC part is going to blow the doors off just by virtue of feature size alone.
It very well may be over hyped but with the breakdown of Dennard scaling[1] the gains we've seen in CPUs has been pretty minor generation to generation.
I think that could also be the reason it is getting so hyped, it is a tangible improvement over other CPUs. 50% more battery life, better performance in some case, what's the last CPU generation we saw such gains? Probably pretty far back to when Dennard sclaing was still a thing?
I'm on a 3 month wait list right now to get an 8 core/16 thread AMD Thinkpad. Nobody else currently produces a sub-15W part with that much computational power.
The major difference vs the M1 is that AMD's micro-PCB design scales in core count rather than producing a single dense power-efficient die.
> I'm on a 3 month wait list right now to get an 8 core/16 thread AMD Thinkpad. Nobody else currently produces a sub-15W part with that much computational power.
This is a big part of the reason that the AMD mobile chip comparisons seem to be kinda besides the point for me. For a bunch of reasons, its almost impossible to get a high quality laptop today w/ the latest and greatest AMD chips that people love to compare to the M1 chips. I know AMD makes great chips, but what does that matter if you can't get buy them in a laptop today?
FWIW - I love AMD, I have a Ryzen desktop for gaming. Its fantastic the competition they are bringing in the desktop market. But I don't want to play the game of searching far and wide for high quality laptops that have the new Ryzen chips _and_ are actually in stock somewhere in a configuration I want _and_ are from a reputable manufacturer.
I was able to pickup a M1 Air on release date w/ the upgraded specs from my local Apple store. It's a glorious machine, and I knew the build quality and hardware is going to be top notch.
OEMs still largely prefer Intel for laptops for whatever reason, which sucks, and it seriously hampers the ability for AMD to compete in this market.
>OEMs still largely prefer Intel for laptops for whatever reason, which sucks, and it seriously hampers the ability for AMD to compete in this market.
OEMs might prefer Intel because, unlike AMD, Intel is actually able to supply the CPUs to go in their notebooks. A slow CPU is better than no CPU. My understanding is that AMD is mainly focused on supplying the gaming console makers, so I don't know that the situation will improve over the next few years for laptop manufactures seeking AMD chips.
Sure, as I said, I think there are many reasons that AMD has largely not been able to make a dent in the laptop market.
I do find it amusing the continual retorts to M1 performance of "but wait until the Ryzen 4800/4900 laptops are out in force!" as if that were something that is realistic at all in the next year. AMD can't even keep up w/ demand for its graphics cards and console chips right now, unfortunately.
We have seen massive improvements in power envelope in CPUs in fairly recent generations, to say nothing of the power improvements seen in some generation->generation GPU improvements.
For example, with an improvement to the 14nm process and not a die shrink, Kaby Lake->Whiskey Lake saw low power processors double in core counts (2C/4T->4C/8T) in essentially the same power/thermal envelope. Basically every thin laptop/ultrabook family doubled its core count.
Well... yeah... but they also dropped clock rate from 2.5GHz-ish to 1.7GHz-ish. That could equally well explain the increase in core count at the same TDP. You're gaining about 15% IPC improvement from Kaby->Whiskey [1].
It's an overall improvement, but not as dramatic as "2x cores for 2x perf at the same power"
"Base" clock dropped, but boost clocks remained fairly high. In practice performance gains were quite good (except, notably, for that time when Apple used old power control firmware and had 6C/12T processors underperform their 4C/8T predecessors).
The point of this is that the significant improvement from Kaby Lake to Whiskey Lake involved only small architectural refinement and updates to an existing process, so much larger performance/power improvements should absolutely be expected from an entirely new process plus architecture refinement.
The M1 is a great and well-refined design but when compared to AMD’s similarly priced 4750U in multi core benchmarks, the performance per watt is better but not by much more than the improved process would suggest. And that’s without the IPC improvements that mobile Zen 3 will bring.
And when compared to last gen 14nm Intel MacBooks, a 5nm TSMC part is going to blow the doors off just by virtue of feature size alone.