Whither Intel or Moore's law?

[philip_t]

There are 4 Mac laptops in the house: 2 MBAs and 2 MBPs. I am thinking of adding another: an i9 MBP 16". Just out of interest I looked at the published benchmarks on the 2019 16" and ran some on the oldest MBP a mid-2010 15" MBP. It transpires that in the sort of multi-core tasks that mean most to me the top 2019 16" MBP is 7.5 times 'better' than the 2010. Now 7.5x is impressive, but not so impressive.
A crude interpretation of Moore's law would seem to indicate it falls a generation short. Is this a fair? Is this why Apple is moving to ARM? Would a swifter move to AMD improve things?

 

[sakagura]

There are 4 Mac laptops in the house: 2 MBAs and 2 MBPs. I am thinking of adding another: an i9 MBP 16". Just out of interest I looked at the published benchmarks on the 2019 16" and ran some on the oldest MBP a mid-2010 15" MBP. It transpires that in the sort of multi-core tasks that mean most to me the top 2019 16" MBP is 7.5 times 'better' than the 2010. Now 7.5x is impressive, but not so impressive.
A crude interpretation of Moore's law would seem to indicate it falls a generation short. Is this a fair? Is this why Apple is moving to ARM? Would a swifter move to AMD improve things?

Meh moving to AMD won't improve things much. The current Zen does finally have better IPC than what Intel offers but that benefit is lost to having lower clock speeds. When Intel moves to 10nm or 7nm then they will keep having a larger clock speed advantage.

For Thunderbolt, it takes longer to certify logic boards for AMD because it has to pass through Intel. Look at PC boards for example. For every Intel motherboard or laptop with Thunderbolt there are 4 times less AMD boards with Thunderbolt.

Would be better just to stick with Intel for now and focus on the real issues. The area Macbook Pro needs improvement is cooling, display, GPU and graphics drivers to match the top Windows laptops.

I can't imagine the hell Apple engineers would go through to fix the T2 or a T3 chip to work without issue on Intel and also AMD. If it is already unstable and producing popping audio on one CPU family then it's just more work to get these controllers to work with two CPU families.