This is as much a ringing endorsement of AMD Ryzen as it is of the M1. The 15W 4800U is just as impressive as the M1, and the performance per watt gap seems small enough to bridge with AMDs upcoming 5nm switch.
AMD definitely is the best of the rest, but it doesn't seem quite as close as it may be held to.
In single core tests the 4800u is running that core at 4.2Ghz. Yet it gets soundly bested by the M1 @ 3 - 3.2Ghz (running at a 50%+ advantage, 65%+ clock per clock). The M1 has an enormous IPC advantage.
In a multicore test the 4800u has 8 performance cores with HT. It only marginally beats an M1 with 4 performance cores and 4 efficiency cores (by the scaling the efficiency cores look like they're 1/4 performance or worse -- these are very lightweight cores).
Again, it's the best of the rest, but Apple clearly holds an enormous lead here. Somehow everyone is focused on 5nm, but the A13 on 7nm was still in a substantial lead. The 4800u on 5nm is only going to be marginally better.
Apple clearly sandbagged this first entrant because they're packing it into their "entry level" devices. In six months or whatever they'll unveil the 6+2 core device in the mid range, the 12+2 in the high range, etc, and we'll be back at these discussions.
(Speaking generally) - This whole discussion about Apple Silicon is fascinating because the goal posts have moved so much. Looking back to HN discussions a year ago and everyone was talking about some pathetically weak entrant that would be a joke, etc. Now people are celebrating that it doesn't beat a 24-core, 300W Threadripper. Now the narrative is that it isn't impressive because the v1 didn't overwhelming destroy everything else in the market.
> The 4800u on 5nm is only going to be marginally better.
This is definitely not true. We already know Zen 3 is +20% IPC over Zen 2 on the same process at the same power. So add 20% to the 4800U without changing anything else as a starting point.
Then toss in the process improvements from 5nm (which TSMC says is either 15% faster or 30% less power) as well as any further architectural improvements that AMD is doing in Zen 4 and there's going to be a very significant gap between the 4800U and AMD's 5nm 6800U or whatever they end up calling it.
To be clear, I said that a 4800u @ 5nm (if one could simply scale a design like that) would only be marginally better. That the 5nm boogeyman is more incremental than the big advantage it is held as.
You replied that if you take the 4800u, switched it to 5nm, switch it to Zen 3...no actually switch it to to Zen 4 and a completely different chip, it would be lots better so what I said is "definitely not true".
A 4800U on 5nm would be 30% more efficient or 15% faster. 5nm was a significant bump.
And that's before considering the density improvement that came along with it (which is also substantial - TSMC's N5 is up to 1.8x the density of N7). Which is why I mentioned Zen 3 & Zen 4, because you don't make the same chip across a shrink. You use the extra budget to do things
When a die shrink is correlated with higher performance, generally that means higher clock speed for a given heat profile. The clock speed of the 4800U is already 50% higher than the M1 when running a single-thread task. And despite that, it is 25-50% slower. And it's significantly less energy efficient.
So put that to 5nm. Either you've partly closed the large efficiency gap, or you've closed the significant performance gap, but in neither case will you come close to closing it entirely. So you're either a little less slower, but still a lot less efficient, or a lot slower, but a little less efficient.
Yeah, maybe they'll do some amazing things on the core that'll overcome all of this. But right now the Firestorm core has a massive advantage. AMD can go to Zen4 and 5nm and maybe they'll close the gap, but Apple won't be sitting still.
Apple entered the desktop space and brought the most efficient core (by _far_), hilariously offering the best per core performance without going to magnitudes higher thermal profiles. It's pretty amazing. So now we're into comparing it to hypothetic, mythical alternatives from competitors in the future.
Sidenote: Apple has had blazing cores for a few years now, and every denier will claim it's just some big cache or some other absurd simplification. If that were the case, everyone would just copy them.
You are making the mistake of equating TDP to actual power draw. The Yoga Slim 7, which uses a 4800U has an average load power of ~50W[0] vs the Mini's load power of ~30W.
