More discussions about Apple Silicon

I have AMD APU Zen7 5700G (8C/16T, cca 4 GHz all cores under full load). I cannot hear the fan. And it is squeezed to 15x15x8 cm box. I would be even better if it is made on the same process like M1, but it would make it more expensive. My setup is 64 GB RAM, 2 x 1 TB fast SSD. And cost? A bit more than 1000 EUR.

It is stronger than M1, but weaker than M1 Pro.

I never said Apple needs outperform x86. Just that it needs to be aproximately on par.... I guess Apple users are not willing to have much weaker maschines than Win users....

Let’s not forget the huge increase of x86 prices not following the usual evolution of the market. Apple anticipated this to keep control on its computer prices without being driven by intel cost. Pc market is now too expensive and ratio price/perf is what drives most of the consumers in the real world, M1 was a huge success being cheaper and more powerful than most high end intel laptop offering an excellent battery life which also drive consumers choice a lot. A MacBook Air was never a good choice for music makers until M1 arrived and changed the game for new comers at an unbeatable price. In fine we are at a time where any setup is good enough in terms of processing power as long as a user learn what turns a setup into chaos. Intel, AMD, Apple, all good 👍 the only thing I hope for is a more decent market becoming reasonable again…

On par in-terms of what? Power to performance? x86 is probably never going to be "on par" in that regard. Intel is still basically throwing more power at the problem regardless of how much little sense it makes. They just released the Alder Lake-HX chips for laptops. Sure they are fast but they also draw far more power (rated at 157W which as we know is Intel being conservative, it's way higher than that in practice), require far more cooling. I personally don't want to go back to the days where my laptop sounds like an airplane when all its doing is updating Office.

My personal 16" MBP running a full session of Logic never even ramps up the fan. I have yet to hear the fan at all and I can run the machine all day on battery at full performance. Again you can't do that on x86 at the moment. When Intel or AMD addresses that then we can talk about being "on par". Otherwise Apple is not even playing the same game as Intel or AMD to begin with. For one Apple could focus on more specialized chips versus just focusing on single or multithreaded performance. Like for example Apple's media encoders and built in neural cores.

Not to mention that Qualcomm is also working on their ARM based equivalent with former Apple Silicon engineers. This is all speculation but to think Apple wouldn't improve their chips performance to fit their users needs is ignoring the fact that Apple has had one of the top performing mobile chips for almost a decade.

Well, Intel is not very good, IMHO.... If I had to choose between Intel and M1, I would prefer M1 and Rosetta (and Windows).

Yes, thanks to AMD, and later Apple, Intel's "four cores will do all, forever" is gone....

I guess Intel will catch the breath. I am sure they have many improvements in a pocket. Just to place it to silicon. Part of Intel's current tragedy were problems with 10 nm technology... They were forced to use 14+++++ nm process, while others alredy used 10, 5 nm. From that fact comes Intel's CPU insanity (old technology pushed to very limits) and hungryness....

And also the fact that they placed everything on one chip, like Apple, while AMD already have used chiplets... It makes redesign easier and production way cheaper.... Intel will switch to chiplets in next generation of CPU. Apple, who knows?

CPU technology evolves very fast past few years. And will do at least for few more years. Apple has pushed x86 platform to focus even more on energy efficiency. Zen 3+ for notebooks shows that x86 may be competetive even in this field. Not better, worse, but pretty close.

I don't understand anything you say, the arm architecture is the next step, less energy consumption, same processing power, and I just came to this forum to complain, since my macbook pro (m1 pro) has problems with maschine and it crashes Randomly, I don't know what preference towards apple silicon you are talking about, because both in windows and in apple, there are many failures of the native software, and I have both, a pc with ryzen 5600x and I must say that it even works better in windows.

5700G works with audio like charm, is silent and visibly stronger than M1. Period. And also cheaper.

5900H (Zen3) is not the latest AMD. It is 6xxx (Zen3+).

AS uses lower frequency than AMD or Intel. It brings lower consumption, but it cost considerably more silicon. And lower power consumption of AS is also due to the fact it uses more advanced process, which is considerably more expensive.

So OK, Apple has a chip that draws less energy, but the cost is it needs more silicon and more advanced and more expensive process. And everything is on one chip, which makes production even more expensive.

If Apple would sell AS chips they would be way too expensive comparing to x86. I guess only few folks would be willing to pay so much just to save a bit electricity.

Apple users are acustomed that Apple products cost quite a bit, so no real problem with expensive CPU in this user segment.

Concerning M2. Apple does not publish its roadmaps. I have investigated pages of Apple fans, their guesses seemed to me be sound. We will see soon, if the guesses were correct.

By saying Apple most probably cannot compete with AMD and Intel I speak about foreseen future, not about now. M1 is OK, just its production is somewhat expensive.