> Ryzen 7 4800U has eight large cores vs 4 large plus 4 small in the M1 and even with your (hypothetical) 20% uplift multicore is just about matching M1.
We're talking about performance per watt. The little cores aren't a disadvantage there -- that's what they're designed for. They use less power than the big cores, allowing the big cores to consume more than half of the power budget and run at higher clocks, but the little cores still exist and do work at high power efficiency. It would actually be a credit to AMD to reach similar efficiency with entirely big cores and on an older process.
> Single core is nowhere near as good.
Geekbench shows Zen 3 as >25% faster than Zen 2 for single thread. Basically everything else shows it as ~20% faster. Geekbench is ridiculous.
> 'Architecture is basically irrelevant' not the biggest factor but not irrelevant - x64 still has to support all those legacy modes and has more complex front end.
This is the same argument people were making twenty years ago about why RISC architectures would overtake x86. They didn't. The transistors dedicated to those aspects of instruction decoding are a smaller percentage of the die today than they were in those days.
> No idea what Qualcomm has to do with this.
The claim was made that Apple has kept ahead of Qualcomm. But Intel and AMD have kept ahead of Qualcomm too, so that isn't saying much.
> You're working very hard to try to deny that Apple has passed AMD and Intel in this bit of the market.
People are working very hard to try to assert that Apple has passed AMD and Intel in this bit of the market. We still don't have any decent benchmarks to know one way or the other.
Half the reason I'm expecting this to be over-hyped is that we keep getting synthetic Geekbench results and not real results from real benchmarks of applications people actually use, which you would think Apple would be touting left and right if they were favorable.
We'll find out soon enough how things stand but just to point out that your first comment on small vs large cores really doesn't work - the benchmarks being quoted are absolute performance not performance per watt benchmarks. Small cores are more power efficient but they do less in a given period of time and hence benchmark lower.
We're talking about performance per watt. The little cores aren't a disadvantage there -- that's what they're designed for. They use less power than the big cores, allowing the big cores to consume more than half of the power budget and run at higher clocks, but the little cores still exist and do work at high power efficiency. It would actually be a credit to AMD to reach similar efficiency with entirely big cores and on an older process.
> Single core is nowhere near as good.
Geekbench shows Zen 3 as >25% faster than Zen 2 for single thread. Basically everything else shows it as ~20% faster. Geekbench is ridiculous.
> 'Architecture is basically irrelevant' not the biggest factor but not irrelevant - x64 still has to support all those legacy modes and has more complex front end.
This is the same argument people were making twenty years ago about why RISC architectures would overtake x86. They didn't. The transistors dedicated to those aspects of instruction decoding are a smaller percentage of the die today than they were in those days.
> No idea what Qualcomm has to do with this.
The claim was made that Apple has kept ahead of Qualcomm. But Intel and AMD have kept ahead of Qualcomm too, so that isn't saying much.
> You're working very hard to try to deny that Apple has passed AMD and Intel in this bit of the market.
People are working very hard to try to assert that Apple has passed AMD and Intel in this bit of the market. We still don't have any decent benchmarks to know one way or the other.
Half the reason I'm expecting this to be over-hyped is that we keep getting synthetic Geekbench results and not real results from real benchmarks of applications people actually use, which you would think Apple would be touting left and right if they were favorable.