Question x86 and ARM architectures comparison thread.

[511]

thanks mostly to AMD

Thanks to Intel and AMD corrected

 

[igor_kavinski]

Thanks to Intel and AMD corrected

Come on. Intel has mostly tried to KILL x86 with their efforts since Skylake.

Alder Lake doesn't count as good coz of crappy Gracemont.

Raptor Lake was pathetic and really needed Intel 4 to fly.

Arrow Lake could've brought Intel back in the game with monolithic architecture, AVX-512, HT and DDR5-8200 base RAM speed but no. Intel keeps finding novel ways to shoot itself in the foot.

I'm told that Lunar Lake is good but the only thing I can really buy is a 226V laptop. Hardly a good purchase for only 16GB RAM.

 

[511]

Come on. Intel has mostly tried to KILL x86 with their efforts since Skylake.

Alder Lake doesn't count as good coz of crappy Gracemont.

Raptor Lake was pathetic and really needed Intel 4 to fly.

Arrow Lake could've brought Intel back in the game with monolithic architecture, AVX-512, HT and DDR5-8200 base RAM speed but no. Intel keeps finding novel ways to shoot itself in the foot.

Their effort to kill x86 was itanium and that became a Titanic that sank also 10nm delays killed post Skylake era architecture and than the slow pace of progression came.

 

[igor_kavinski]

Their effort to kill x86 was itanium and that became a Titanic that sank also 10nm delays killed post Skylake era architecture and than the slow pace of progression came.

Oh come on. Stop with the excuses. Just admit that Intel did a disservice to their own baby. It's shameful that their competitor had to take x86 and mold it into something resembling decent.

I'm still hoping that they will do good with Panther Lake (because they say it's an improvement over Lunar Lake) but Nova Lake? I'm as skeptical as I would be if I was told that an elephant could go through a human sized door.

 

[johnsonwax]

Finally a thread where I can openly call Apple absolute cowards. Because if they aren't, why don't they support at least one Linux distro officially so we can have a proper comparison with other architectures? They are sitting on a ton of cash. Surely they have enthusiast engineers who wouldn't mind doing open source in their free time.

Because Apple is a business, not your hobby horse. They don't care about your comparisons. They barely even tell you what silicon is in the product.

Apple Silicon is a carefully orchestrated deception/delusion of hardware+software and it makes financial sense only for a very small subset of people with particular computing needs to do things the Apple way. If anyone thinks that Apple computers will become as popular as iPhones, keep dreaming. Maybe a decade if M$ keeps up their charade to force people off Windows with their stupid shenanigans. But I see it more likely that Windows on ARM will take the place of x86 Windows. The MacOS UI, the design of the typical application and so many other annoying little things will prevent most seasoned Windows users from switching.

The only one dreaming about Macs becoming as popular as iPhones is you. Not even Apple dreams of that. That's not their goal. Hasn't been their goal at any point in the last 28 years. PC units peaked in 2012 by the way. It's been on a steady decline ever since. iPad and iPhone ate a decent chunk of that.

Here's one reason why I think Apple Silicon is nothing special. I use VLC player. Sometimes, the battery lasts about an hour on my M1 MBA. Sometimes two hours. The battery life depends on the type of codec, is what I'm guessing. How is this superior silicon that needs properly coded software to work properly? On Windows hardware, you run anything you want and you can mostly expect predictable battery life.

Are you a child? You think that Windows can magically apparate a hardware codec inside the computer? Go benchmark some ProRes decode on your Windows machine and an M4 and tell us what battery life you get.

 

[igor_kavinski]

Because Apple is a business, not your hobby horse. They don't care about your comparisons. They barely even tell you what silicon is in the product.

Yes. They suck because they don't care.

The only one dreaming about Macs becoming as popular as iPhones is you. Not even Apple dreams of that. That's not their goal. Hasn't been their goal at any point in the last 28 years. PC units peaked in 2012 by the way. It's been on a steady decline ever since. iPad and iPhone ate a decent chunk of that.

I wonder why they even bother.

Go benchmark some ProRes decode on your Windows machine and an M4 and tell us what battery life you get.

ProRes isn't used by common folks.

 

[poke01]

You can't hide behind spoiler tags

Finally a thread where I can openly call Apple absolute cowards. Because if they aren't, why don't they support at least one Linux distro officially so we can have a proper comparison with other architectures? They are sitting on a ton of cash. Surely they have enthusiast engineers who wouldn't mind doing open source in their free time.

Because Apple is a consumer electronics company, not a sillicon merchant one where their business needs are to support Linux natively but would it be nice if they did. You don’t need Linux to compare architectures, that’s not how it works because a good architecture is good anywhere regardless of OS. We got bare metal Linux on M1 Macs and the performance is basically the same as macOS..

Here's one reason why I think Apple Silicon is nothing special. I use VLC player. Sometimes, the battery lasts about an hour on my M1 MBA. Sometimes two hours. The battery depends on the type of codec, is what I'm guessing. How is this superior silicon that needs properly coded software to work properly? On Windows hardware, you run anything you want and you can mostly expect predictable battery life.

Yeah, that hasn’t been my experience and I bet anyone else here using an ARM MacBook can attest to it. You had problems with your MacBook regarding the battery before and without knowing the cycle count, it’s hard to know.

The battery depends on the type of codec, is what I'm guessing. How is this superior silicon that needs properly coded software to work properly?

What is this BS lol. Video playback is something to do with the hardware decoders not ARM or x86. Unless you played AV1 video which would be CPU based cause the M1 has no hardware decoder for AV1.

see this more for knowledge here:

How software AV1 video decoding affects battery consumption on Macbook Pro

AV1 is the codec preferred by Internet streaming services for serving videos. But not every SoC comes with a hardware decoder. What is the cost, in terms of power usage and battery consumption, of using an AV1 software decoder?

www.xtof.info

I daily a Dell Latitude i7 1260p for work (Excel and more Excel), and its the worst laptop I ever used so don’t even bring up windows hardware being better more predictable battery wise cause its not.

 

[OneEng2]

Other than custom processors (which only companies with GOD like resources can afford to create), I haven't seen anything impressive out of ARM in DC. It pretty much gets squashed by Zen 5.

As for Apples ARM, they have produced some pretty good chips .... but they are not yet making much waves in desktop (certainly not HPC) or laptops. Sure, Windows on ARM is there, but with incompatibility being a real thing to most people, it isn't going anywhere fast at this point.

M4 is on N3E and is about 80mm2 and has 10 cores (and a bunch of other stuff). Zen 5c in DC is 73mm2 and has 16 cores.

Zen 5 pretty much wipes the floor with M4 in highly threaded workloads. Of course, M4 is the performance per power king as its roots are from this standpoint.

Yes, x86 is only really competitive in laptops, desktops and servers. ARM is dominant EVERYWHERE else .... but that is because EVERYWHERE else is power limited OR cost sensitive.

No one makes a tiny x86 core for super simple things. EVERYONE makes a tiny M0 ARM for a bizillion different little tasks.

I still don't think that either architecture is "bad". They are just targeted for different things.

Now, if you want to change the discussion to which architecture is better positioned for future profit? THAT is an interesting discussion.

My answer? x86... (at least AMD's version). It literally doesn't matter if ARM ends up in every small device on the planet. The big margins are in DC and AI. I think x86 is in a much better position than ARM for the big margin business (and the one with the most growth potential).

 

[poke01]

Good points and this is exactly why comparing x86 to Apple Silicon is a fool's errand.

not really. Jim Keller compares his cores to Apple's and so does AMD/Intel. So while you don't care, the industry cares

 

[igor_kavinski]

What is this BS lol. Video playback is something to do with the hardware decoders not ARM or x86. Unless you played AV1 video which would be CPU based cause the M1 has no hardware decoder for AV1.

That is possible though I wonder why common TV series encodes would be AV1 based. Has the codec become that popular?

I daily a Dell Latitude i7 1260p for work (Excel and more Excel), and its the worst laptop I ever used so don’t even bring up windows hardware being better more predictable battery wise cause its not.

You are using the worst possible x86 architecture with lame Gracemonts doing most of the heavy lifting. At least get your workplace to issue you a decent Ryzen laptop. Even a 226V laptop may be a huge improvement over the crap chip your laptop has.

In Excel, at least, I do agree that M1 is impossibly good.

 

[poke01]

Zen 5 pretty much wipes the floor with M4 in highly threaded workloads. Of course, M4 is the performance per power king as its roots are from this standpoint.

when you mean Zen5 which Zen 5? Do you mean Strix Point or Strix Halo or the 9950X?

 

[igor_kavinski]

when you mean Zen5 which Zen 5? Do you mean Strix Point or Strix Halo or the 9950X?

It's a moot point. Apple Silicon becomes prohibitively expensive when scaled to higher core counts.

 

[johnsonwax]

Yes. They suck because they don't care.

They're not your mommy.

I wonder why they even bother.

$94B in revenue last quarter.

ProRes isn't used by common folks.

Since you don't even seem to know what codec was causing the problem, who's to say whether it was common or not. You expect Apple to have WMV hardware support?

 

[OneEng2]

It's hard to compare Apple hardware to x86 as Apple has a close to metal integration with their own OS that x86 can't compete with. This has always been true.

when you mean Zen5 which Zen 5? Do you mean Strix Point or Strix Halo or the 9950X?

Does it matter? Core for core Zen 5 with SMT will outperform M4. Zen 5 also comes in variants having many many more cores than M4 making any highly threaded app a wipe out in favor of Zen 5 IMO.

If i am off base here let me know.

 

[igor_kavinski]

My answer? x86... (at least AMD's version). It literally doesn't matter if ARM ends up in every small device on the planet. The big margins are in DC and AI. I think x86 is in a much better position than ARM for the big margin business (and the one with the most growth potential).

Things may heat up really quick if AMD also debuts their own ARM effort (Sound Wave APU).

But still, I think it won't win in volume because x86 chips hit a lot of the price points that actually matter to most people. I can't still see Snapdragon Plus laptops selling for $500 yet even though it's supposed to be a trash SKU.

 

[igor_kavinski]

You expect Apple to have WMV hardware support?

That's not the point. It's touted as a general purpose efficient CPU. But I found software (VLC player) that proves that wrong. Either M1 has some serious shortcomings that were fixed in later iterations or it's just not that good a CPU architecture without properly written software.

 

[511]

Does it matter? Core for core Zen 5 with SMT will outperform M4. Zen 5 also comes in variants having many many more cores than M4 making any highly threaded app a wipe out in favor of Zen 5 IMO.

If i am off base here let me know.

Only in MT Scenario not ST Scenario in performance/mm2 Performance/watt maybe this as well but it hasn't been benched.

 

[johnsonwax]

In Excel, at least, I do agree that M1 is impossibly good.

Which is weird because Mac Excel on i9 MBP was trash. I drove that as a data scientist and it was significantly slower than Windows Excel on the same machine.

 

[poke01]

But I found software (VLC player) that proves that wrong. Either M1 has some serious shortcomings that were fixed in latter iterations or it's just not that good a CPU architecture without properly written software.

VLC uses hardware acceleration by default. So video playback isn't even running off the CPU cores unless its AV1

 

[igor_kavinski]

Which is weird because Mac Excel on i9 MBP was trash. I drove that as a data scientist and it was significantly slower than Windows Excel on the same machine.

I haven't benched a multicore Excel workload yet (keep forgetting) but using overclock.net's Excel benchmark sheet, the M1 was almost as fast as a 12700K. This sheet is mostly single thread heavy and seeing the M1 crunch through it without making any noise was insane.

I could be confusing Excel with Librecalc though. I just remember that I was blown away by the benchmark sheet giving the final result so quickly.

 

[igor_kavinski]

VLC uses hardware acceleration by default.

On your M4, what does it say in video renderer when playing, suppose, an mp4 or mkv file?

 

[poke01]

It's hard to compare Apple hardware to x86 as Apple has a close to metal integration with their own OS that x86 can't compete with. This has always been true.

I don't agree with this cause we can use x86 core running Linux via SPEC2017. AMD is able to optmise it cores as well with Linux as Apple does with macOS

 

[johnsonwax]

That's not the point. It's touted as a general purpose efficient CPU. But I found software (VLC player) that proves that wrong. Either M1 has some serious shortcomings that were fixed in later iterations or it's just not that good a CPU architecture without properly written software.

Except you weren't decoding the video on the CPU on x86, you were decoding it in custom silicon that the M1 possibly didn't have. Disable that custom silicon and tell us what battery life you get. That's why the M4 will absolutely annihilate anything x86 on ProRes because Apple Silicon has hardware codec.

Regardless, there's no universe in which a properly functioning M1 would have a 1 hr battery life doing anything. I've run games 100% CPU/GPU for 8 hours on battery on a 4 year old M1.

 

[johnsonwax]

On your M4, what does it say in video renderer when playing, suppose, an mp4 or mkv file?

MP4 and MKV are container formats, not video formats. You are demanding technical explanations when you don't understand what you are talking about.

 

[igor_kavinski]

I've run games 100% CPU/GPU for 8 hours on battery on a 4 year old M1.

That's an incredible claim and I have to wonder if it was a browser game

Since I dislike using MacOS for anything other than watching movies (because it's the only usable 13.3 inch laptop I have), I can't think of any proper way of analyzing my laptop's real world battery life. I don't want to forcefully browse or watch Youtube on that laptop just to test the battery life. And even if it delivers on that promise, useless to me since that's not my use case for it.

Do you have a suggestion for a better free video player other than VLC player for me to test?