Good. That means Apple disrupted the market. Without competition there would be little progress.
Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
AMD Claims New Laptop Chip Is 30% Faster Than M1 Pro, Promises Up to 30 Hours of Battery Life
- Thread starter MacRumors
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
Just curious, what to you mean by "bad"?
I lived through the PowerPC era, and really liked Macs back then. In many ways, I preferred Apple as a company back then and feel like their products and SW was a lot better when compared to the competition.
Other than not having the ability to easily and natively dual boot Windows, and comparisons between chips not always being easy to do, I am unsure of "how bad it was".
I guess maybe towards the end of the era, and the lack of progress, especially with the laptops maybe be considered bad.
There is probably something I am missing.
I'm somewhat confused. Apple is capable of making realistic claims when it comes to battery life, as they are designing the entire laptop themselves. AMD, however, is not. This Ryzen 9 7940HS will exist in laptops that vary significantly in terms of what size of battery pack the laptop is going to be combined with. Different manufacturers are going to use different memory modules, different storage modules, different WiFi modules etc. All of these things are going to affect battery life. Especially what kind of battery pack is being used on the laptop.
The Ryzen 9 7940HS, like pretty much every other modern CPU, doesn't come with a fixed power envelope either. So Asus might target a higher power envelope in laptop A, while Lenovo set a different target on laptop B. Power usage will not be static with this CPU.
I do not doubt its efficiency. But specific claims on how many hours of battery you will see using this CPU seem strange to me. And one problem with such claims is that you don't have any context on achieving them. The Apple M1 and M2 are great at using little energy, even during peak performance. The issue with X86-based CPUs has often been that they can, in theory be very power efficient if you let them run in specific low-power states. The issue is that performance in this state is abysmal, and you often have at least some kind of software on the machine that is more or less prohibiting efficient use of this state, so in reality, you never end up with this kind of battery life in actual use.
The Ryzen 9 7940HS, like pretty much every other modern CPU, doesn't come with a fixed power envelope either. So Asus might target a higher power envelope in laptop A, while Lenovo set a different target on laptop B. Power usage will not be static with this CPU.
I do not doubt its efficiency. But specific claims on how many hours of battery you will see using this CPU seem strange to me. And one problem with such claims is that you don't have any context on achieving them. The Apple M1 and M2 are great at using little energy, even during peak performance. The issue with X86-based CPUs has often been that they can, in theory be very power efficient if you let them run in specific low-power states. The issue is that performance in this state is abysmal, and you often have at least some kind of software on the machine that is more or less prohibiting efficient use of this state, so in reality, you never end up with this kind of battery life in actual use.
But but PC bros in 2020 told me that
1) Apple M1 was all about efficiency and optimization tricks with fixed function accelerators, not raw power
2) There was no point in comparing Intel/AMD CPUs to Apple’s SoCs because it’s not like you can build a PC with an Apple CPU, they are different worlds
How the tables turn…what an achievement for Apple to be already a benchmark after only 2 years in the laptop/desktop CPU market..
1) Apple M1 was all about efficiency and optimization tricks with fixed function accelerators, not raw power
2) There was no point in comparing Intel/AMD CPUs to Apple’s SoCs because it’s not like you can build a PC with an Apple CPU, they are different worlds
How the tables turn…what an achievement for Apple to be already a benchmark after only 2 years in the laptop/desktop CPU market..
Not only that, IMHO it dramatically shifted competition towards achieving high energy efficiency.
It's not enough anymore to have very high performance if said performance requires aggressive thermal throttling or bulky/loud thermal dissipation.
This is certainly a case where more competition helps consumers; this is really nice to see and hopefully we'll continue to see even better chips over time
my concern with AMD and Intel is how hot their chips run.
They didn't do much in the desktop area so I have some doubts regarding the mobile.
I do have a PC desktop for gaming and the temps are way off of what Apple currently has to offer.
They didn't do much in the desktop area so I have some doubts regarding the mobile.
I do have a PC desktop for gaming and the temps are way off of what Apple currently has to offer.
The M1 Pro was introduced in October 2021. Apple should have an m2 pro out now but they don’t. There is no way that AMD should have a process lead over apple (4nm vs 5nm), but because apple is resting on laurels, AMD now appears to have such a lead.
Apple coulda shoulda woulda beat AMD. They need to stop slacking.
Apple coulda shoulda woulda beat AMD. They need to stop slacking.
"It's worth noting that the M1 Pro is over one year old". AMD'S Numbers are impressive but they are still comparing against a year+ old chip to declare victory.
God I want some real competition but its lagging. Apple though is suffering from brain drain/poaching however (tables do turn) so things might be very interesting in the next few years.
Last edited:
It was stated that Apple’s most powerful chip for laptops is the M1 Max.
The one that is found only in the Mac Studio is the M1 Ultra.
Honestly, the fact that they're doing this 15 months after the M1 Pro came out doesn't matter to me. Nor that it will likely be a hotter running chip. The fact that they're even able to catch up to M1 Pro for performance and battery life and with the x86 architecture (which, between the number of supported PCs and Macs still out there, is still the most popular architecture) is great and should be celebrated even by diehard Apple fans that have ditched all their Intel Macs and will never touch a PC ever. Competition is good and that includes AMD and that also includes x86.
Blind fanboyism is never a good thing.
Without AMD we would be still stuck with Intel's monopoly with CPUs consisting of 2-4 cores.
Without Apple's M1, CPU manufactures wouldn't work this hard to improve performance and more importantly power efficiency.
Now AMD is striking back with both performance and efficiency, which should push Apple to step up their game again, as M1 to M2 kinda stalled in performance with no competition.
Without AMD we would be still stuck with Intel's monopoly with CPUs consisting of 2-4 cores.
Without Apple's M1, CPU manufactures wouldn't work this hard to improve performance and more importantly power efficiency.
Now AMD is striking back with both performance and efficiency, which should push Apple to step up their game again, as M1 to M2 kinda stalled in performance with no competition.
So you didn't read anything on the thread? That they are using very specific x86 optimised tests like cinebench to show the advantage? I'd like to see the same tests using Apple advantage weighted tests.
Oh and it'll still comparing AMDs chip against the last generation Apple M1 Chip - pro or otherwise. M3 will be out soon enough.
It's like saying one EV has more range than another. Without referencing the size of the battery pack it's hard to draw too many conclusions about efficiency. Many modern laptops use displays that can draw 8 - 12 watts. Given a typical laptop battery size 30 hours is challenging even with no CPU inside. Obviously you can do it with design trade-offs, like a small and dim screen, much larger battery, etc.
I'm sure this is going to be a great product and the efficiency will serve them well in servers and mobile compared to Intel's offerings. However, x86 has lost the efficiency game against Arm and RISC-V particularly in the important data center. It's a legacy product on borrowed time existing only to run instances of Windows Server and Linux x86 for customers who can't port. This is important because without the data center revenues client alone won't be enough to fund the next round of development.
The competition has caught up to Apple?
AMD compared their new chip to the M1 Pro and not the M1 Max.
30 hours for chip alone, 5 hours for laptop itself
Optimization will be achieved in next drivers release, and then broken after another Windows major update.
I should've been more clear. By "how bad it can get" I was specifically referring to CPU performance during two specific eras:
1. The "Mhz Myth" era when the PowerMac G4 was stuck at 500Mhz for what felt like an eternity (it was ~18 months) while PC's raced past 1Ghz. That was followed up by a better but still underwhelming era of G4 upgrades that took slowly took us 1.25Ghz (again while the competition continued to race ahead.) Apple tried to make up for it with dual processors and altivec optimizations (the "Velocity Engine") but IMHO it was still a pretty rough time to be Mac user unless your use case was hyper optimized for those things.
2. The period after the PowerMac G5 was released when the PowerBook/iBook were stuck with increasingly unimpressive PowerPC G4 parts.
I still remember how the first Intel MacBooks with dual core Core Duos just absolutely blew almost everything else away performance wise. It was... basically an M1 moment (on the CPU side, the GPU was less impressive)
Looking at he discourse on this forum, so many people seem to be deluding themselves into thinking Apple will always be able to maintain a lead or at least keep up and I just think that kind of thinking is way too optimistic given how hard /competitive chip design is.
That said, I don't disagree that in many ways I liked the Apple of the late 90s/early 2000s under Steve Jobs much more than I like the Apple of today. The products managed to be beautifully designed, functional, and user upgradeable all at the same time. For all my complaining, those dual processor PowerMac G4s (and the PowerMac G5!) were just so freakin COOL (don't even get me started on the G4 Cube.)
OS X (macOS), despite it's rocky start also had a much clearer vision and direction at the time.
Then there was the iPod and Apple Aperture toward the end of that era...... man that Apple really was innovative, boundary pushing, bold... The service was better too.
I guess "how bad it can get" really wasn't so bad after all... 🤔
Well by that logic, Apple doesn’t make anything.
As for AMD, vs Apple, AMD just demonstrated it can skate to where the puck has been.
And since it's unlikely that an AMD or Intel chip will be inside a Mac ever again... you could say that Apple is skating on an entirely different rink!