alt Hacker NewsDid Jeff Geerling get paid to post misleading headlines and reviews on Intel vs Apple?
He's basing this on his own "super computing benchmark" measuring only FP64 performance. Meanwhile, any normal person using these $600 laptops will never run FP64 supercomputing tasks on the CPU.
He also only showed perf/watt in this one benchmark but skipped the fact that Apple Silicon is significantly faster.
Obviously, all this efficiency is on the low end—the laptop only achieves a little over 120 Gflops, while Apple's faster M3 and M4 Macs are pushing through up to 1.2 Teraflops.
Replies
Getting performance per watt out of the smaller CPUs is actually more impressive because they can't amortize the non-CPU power draws in the system over as much performance. Increasing the performance while maintaining that performance per watt is then entirely straightforward because you just use more of the same cores.
> This is like saying my Intel Pentium 3 matches Apple M5 in perf/watt
... if it was within orders of magnitude of being true, perhaps.
No, this laptop was loaned to me for a couple weeks (it's boxed up and ready to ship back now), and I fully disclose any and all sponsorship (this was not sponsored in any way); see my policies here: https://github.com/geerlingguy/youtube#sponsorships
Further, I'm basing my opinion on a number of benchmarks and power measurements besides just HPL. I just favor that because it's one of the few that push a CPU hard, fills system memory, and can't easily be gamed/made irrelevant with new architecture.
The main point of my blog post is to say this is the first Intel chip that's even punched in the same weight class as any Apple Silicon, wrt efficiency. It quite surprised me.