AMD Claims New Laptop Chip Is 30% Faster Than M1 Pro, Promises Up to 30 Hours of Battery Life

[Tyler O'Bannon]

Is the M2 Pro already available or at least announced? Ca you provide some links?
And you think AMD won't move to 3nm? Zen 5 is supposed to be a big architectural change + 3nm. Do you think that will result in weak CPUs?

?

Did you read?

I said it’s not even out yet. It releases in March (Ryzen).

And I said it’s being compared against against an Apple chip that’s already over a year old (M1 Pro).

I did not say anything about M2 Pro.

But, to match your trolling tone, this ain’t a research paper, it doesn’t require links, and only a dummy doesn’t know that M2 Pro et. al. is coming fairly soon. And we know that 3nm production has officially begun at TSMC. None of this is a secret.

Here comes AMD 16 months later (upon release) doing 30% better. Apple will do 30 % better or more soon. And at significantly lower wattage, lower heat, less fan requirement, and better battery life.

 

[svish]

Good to see competition. Looking to see the performance of Apple’s M2 Pro chip.

 

[Havoc035]

Interesting that AMD managed to get so close with x86. Let’s see what M2 Pro has in store in the coming months.

 

[atomic.flip]

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... 🤔

All excellent points and to add one more. The significance of this news is that Apple being unable to sustain a quantitative performance lead for a substantial amount of time means the PC market won't be affected by processor performance alone.

This is a much more complex market and if Apple wants to remain relevant in the personal computing department then they need to pull something closer to an iphone out of their R&D.

Something so far beyond the other offerings that it both redefines an entire category of devices and enables fundamentally new interface experiences.

Every attempt at this has been luke warm and even abandoned early in the product life cycle due to an inability to recruit developer / OEM interests.

Also... Until Apple begins to offer an M series processor to other OEMs these comparisons only serve to discourage people from jumping over to the Mac platform. Which in some ways is looking like more and more of the sort of transition you'd have to make back in the multiplatform days of old you mention above.

 

[nick42983]

All at the cost of running Windows? No thanks. Never again as my main OS.

 

[High IQ Person]

As I said before, "design" doesn't matter. It's all about fabbing process. Apple just wants you to think they're smart and doing intellectual things, when designing chips is one of the easiest parts of chip development and almost entirely unimpactful to performance.

 

[High IQ Person]

If anything, it looks like Apple Silicon has really increased competition between the chipmakers.

No. Fabless designs don't matter, hence why intel only achieved marginal performance gains the entire decade they were stuck on 14nm. AMD leapfrogged intel when TSMC surpassed intel's fabbing process.

Stop giving Apple credit for doing a low intelligence task. Designing a chip is easy and rather insignificant.

 

[neilpmas]

merely using a foundry like TSMC to produce them.

Can we stop saying merely. TSMC has a monopoly on sub 7nm chips. It costs 10B to build a factory, or > 3 times apples largest company purchase. They are the company running the show.

 

[High IQ Person]

Can we stop saying merely. TSMC has a monopoly on sub 7nm chips. It costs 10B to build a factory, or > 3 times apples largest company purchase. They are the company running the show.

Also, developing a low-distance node process is orders of magnitude more difficult intellectually than designing a chip using someone else's fab technology. Designing a chip is about as intellectually difficult as ordering pizza or building a PC. It's child's play and rather insignificant in terms of performance. Notice how intel's performance didn't improve at all when they were stuck on 14nm and then they made a very large performance jump during the jump to 10nm for 12th gen? Yeah, that's because "design" doesn't matter.
Intel's performance stagnation on 14nm for a decade should be the biggest proof that "design" is just a marketing gimmick. Apple wants you to think they're smarter than they really are.

 

[ajfahey]

It uses external, not unified RAM. It does not include a Thunderbolt 4 controller, just USB4. being faster than a 2 year old M1 tech is not the same as being faster across a spectrum of use cases customers care about.

 

[ponzicoinbro]

It uses external, not unified RAM. It does not include a Thunderbolt 4 controller, just USB4. being faster than a 2 year old M1 tech is not the same as being faster across a spectrum of use cases customers care about.

Unified memory makes a big difference, especially so if you have lots of RAM. The GPU can use whatever is free.

 

[OriginalBaki]

It uses external, not unified RAM. It does not include a Thunderbolt 4 controller, just USB4. being faster than a 2 year old M1 tech is not the same as being faster across a spectrum of use cases customers care about.

AMD also makes APUs

 

[pshufd]

Yep, the whole macOS platform is kind of useless, except for video editing (encoding), iOS/macOS dev and daily consumer tasks. 3D Software on macOS runs very unstable, Maya crashes all the time, Blender is not optimized, 3DMax does not even exist. No decent CAD Apps like Solidworks, ProE, CATIA, etc. exists.
Audio wise it’s s also a deception, FL Studio and Ableton runs worse than on Windows, many nice VST plugs does not exist for Apple Silicon or runs bad, etc.

I hope this AMD news is true, because the only advantage Apple Silicon has is the Speed to Power consumption/runtime ratio.

And I don’t even want to get into Gaming or other graphical features (shaders) where macOS and Apple Silicon just sucks.

My son uses his in the oncogenomics world and he's been working through the issues for a year and he says things are in good shape given that his work is on Apple Silicon and his team is migrating from Intel Macs.

 

[pshufd]

I'm in the market for a new desktop, still trying to decide whether to build my own PC or get a Mac Studio. I'm waiting to see what this spring holds for hardware announcements.

I really love my Studio but I'm open to a PC build if it can achieve the same performance per watt and run twice as fast and fit in a small box on my desk. I don't actually think that much about my Studio anymore as it's not visible on my desktop. It just quietly goes about its work without me having to think about it.

 

[pshufd]

My stock portfolio likes AMD!

Are you short?

 

[Unregistered 4U]

Can we stop saying merely. TSMC has a monopoly on sub 7nm chips. It costs 10B to build a factory, or > 3 times apples largest company purchase. They are the company running the show.

Don’t bother, the person you’re responding to has only 16 posts, many repeating the same claims that would only be made by someone that’s never designed any chips. Just ignore.

 

[Bodhitree]

It seems to me that Apple’s marketing claims when launching the M1 and M1 Pro were largely borne out, they produced impressive performance at a much lower power level. For AMD it has yet to be seen what exactly they mean when they say 30% faster and 30 hours of battery life. Do they mean 30% faster while on battery or while plugged in? and 30 hours of battery life sounds pretty unrealistic, too good to be true.

I suspect they’ve just optimised a few functions for low-power usage, like video playback, and for the rest have pushed hell-for-leather for more performance.

 

[M3gatron]

?

Did you read?

I said it’s not even out yet. It releases in March (Ryzen).

Of course I've read what you wrote, there's nothing in my comment that indicates that I didn't.
March is effective availability for products running with these new chips, yesterday was the official launch of these new Ryzen APUs.

And I said it’s being compared against against an Apple chip that’s already over a year old (M1 Pro).

Of course it's compared to the M1 Pro, it's the latest available from Apple.

I did not say anything about M2 Pro.

Well you obviously implied that there's a huge problem with their comparison when there's none. Mentioning M1 Pro 's age is as a problem is irrelevant, it's not like they can compare their chip with something they can't get their hands on. They also compared it with Intel's 12 gen as the 13 was just announced.

But, to match your trolling tone, this ain’t a research paper, it doesn’t require links, and only a dummy doesn’t know that M2 Pro et. al. is coming fairly soon. And we know that 3nm production has officially begun at TSMC. None of this is a secret.

Yeah it's just a low level unreasonable rant attempt, successfully using irony is the best way for me to show it.
Also if 3nm mass production officially began either the M2 pro will not be on 3nm, or if it is we won't see it anytime soon. Leaked data suggests it will use 4 or 5nm.

Here comes AMD 16 months later (upon release) doing 30% better. Apple will do 30 % better or more soon. And at significantly lower wattage, lower heat, less fan requirement, and better battery life.

M2 actually isn't 30% better in CPU vs previous generation. And AMD is doing up to 78% better actually on their higher end SKUs, and even above 30% vs their previous generation with the same number of cores and threads. That's above what Apple archived with the M2.
Also regarding your "significantly lower wattage", heat, etc. claims you are just trying to do damage control, these AMD APUs use TSMC 4nm, performance and efficiency characteristics will be excelent. Their temps were already excelent on 7 and 6nm.

 

[M3gatron]

"Our new top-of-the-line laptop chip is a bit faster than Apple's mid-line laptop chip, released 14½ months ago", carefully not mentioning Apple's top-of-the-line laptop chip - the M1 Max, also released 14½ months ago - and not mentioning that a M2 Pro/Max will likely be along soon.

Competition is good, but in absolute terms, they don't have much to trumpet here.

LoL, the Ryzen 7040 series are mid-range, the Ryzen 7045 are the top of the line with 12 and 16 cores and up to 78% faster performance than previous generation.
Also M1 Pro and Max both have up to 10 CPU cores, the main difference is in GPU and AMDs comparison focused on CPU.
Even if AMD used the 8 core M1 Pro it's still a fair 8 core vs 8 core comparison. Their 12 core Ryzen APUs will easily be another 30% faster than their 8 core ones.

 

[hybrid_x]

OUTPERFORMS THE LOW-END MIDRANGE APPLE CHIP FROM 15 MONTHS AGO!​

Wow… where do I sign up?

 

[Gudi]

Yep, that IS the situation, however I do believe that the recent disturbance in the geopolitical situation throws a slight wrench in the gears of what would be ordinary commercial competition.

Taiwan is crucial for global chip supply. We would not only have a global recession, but WW3 if China invades. That's why I hope this conflict will stay cold. If it doesn't who knows, who will actually survive the nuclear winter?

 

[George Dawes]

Fortunately Apple isn't all abut the hardware specs

Like Nintendo they can do wonderful things with less than state of the art gear

 

[unrigestered]

great to see some serious competition!
this will benefit everyone, even if mine might not be longer anymore at this point (or maybe even for a while)

this would be only worrisome if Apple were SEVERELY underperforming with no light at the end of the tunnel, and not just because some other manufacturer has released something slightly "better" for a year or two.
congrats to them, but it also shows that the others had been lazy AF in the years before.
now it might be their turn to make sure that Apple won't sit on their laurels.

but still, unless working on Apple Silicon is simply too slow for you, which, in most use cases, other than 3D rendering (both real time and ray tracing), will not be the case for 99% of the users, you will still have an awesome machine.
same as people will still have an awesome machine when they get an i5 instead of an i9.
and even if you're getting the fastest i9 with a 4090, you can be sure that next year, it won't be the fastest anymore.
are you forced to buy a new system just by the fact that something marginally better has been released, or is such a system still more than just plenty fast for next couple of years too?

 

[Abazigal]

Claiming that doing something will help spur competition in the industry doesn't automatically exempt it from criticism.

 

[pasamio]

Gaming? Had they not effectively shutdown iOS app on macOS feature back in Big Sur days, gaming on macOS would’ve been great. Now, it’s just as bad.

I'm curious what you meant by the iOS App feature? It's still there and still works but the app developer needs to permit their apps to run on the M series Macs.

Apple looks in rear view mirror, sees nothing.
Adjusts side view mirror, sees nothing.
Opens the door, steps out of the vehicle and peers into the distance, sees nothing.
There’s still only one company making macOS systems, there’s no competition.

Apple have repeatedly said their market is the broader hardware market, they make a computer, a phone or a tablet. They don't make an operating system for the sake of an operating system, they don't make chips for the sake of making chips, they make all of these pieces together to build a unified product. This is where everyone else falls over because when the CPU makers were busy building hexacore CPU's, Apple leapfrogged them and shipped a 64-bit chip. Immediately the scramble was on to move to 64-bit.

But it is. History is littered with examples. In fact, no chip architecture has maintained its lead forever. Do you really think Apple invests more into chip design than Intel or AMD? I doubt it. Apple has a nice lead now. Nothing guarantees that lead will last the next five years, much less forever.

I could see Apple investing a comparable amount of money into chip design as AMD. Back in 2011, they had a thousand people working on chip design and in 2019 they picked up 2,200 people from Intel to do wireless chip work. AMD have around 12,000 people, not all of them are likely to be chip designers given there needs to be folk to do finance, marketing, investor relations, security, software development and more in that number. It's not inconceivable that Apple actually has a head count for silicon not too far off AMD's actual number. I agree nothing guarantees it

It's also useful to put in perspective that Apple probably sells more chips than AMD does when you tally up the iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch and Mx series devices they sell per year.

Versus Intel is harder to say since Intel has so much noise because of the much wider portfolio they have.

Also... Until Apple begins to offer an M series processor to other OEMs these comparisons only serve to discourage people from jumping over to the Mac platform. Which in some ways is looking like more and more of the sort of transition you'd have to make back in the multiplatform days of old you mention above.

That's entirely why both Intel and AMD seem to be advertising so aggressively against Apple Silicon. The Intel marketing at one point could have applied to any x86 CPU and AMD now have shown they feel threatened by Apple's good showing for performance per watt. Why would either CPU maker attack a company that doesn't compete against them in their main market? They're trying to ensure people stick in their ecosystem.

Of course it's compared to the M1 Pro, it's the latest available from Apple.

Why not the M1 Max though?