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This observation certainly won’t win me many friends around here. But if Intel or AMD releases a chip with the just-announced capabilities Apple’s new M4 ProWith the kind of IPC, GPU, and memory bus that Apple silicon offers, we’d all lose our little minds. This is why I wish I could buy a laptop or gaming portable with Apple silicon.

Because the new M4 Pro works on a completely different level. To guide you through the rhetorical transition, let’s ignore for now the numerous caveats that come with such thought experiments, the lack of Windows OS support, the question marks, the challenges regarding real-world gaming performance on an Apple-designed GPU. comparing ray tracing performance and similar things.

Let’s focus on the hardware instead. For starters, Apple has access to TSMC’s latest N3E manufacturing node, also known as the most advanced silicon known to humanity. While AMD used the N4, which is two generations old, Intel preferred the last generation N3B. new Lunar Lake chip.

This is Apple’s first clear advantage, as the N3E proves to be much more power efficient than the N3B, and both more efficient and much denser than the N4; the latter is derived from TSMC’s N5 node.

Then there’s Apple’s CPU architecture. In Cinebench 2024’s single-thread test, Apple’s latest CPU cores in the M4 generation can clock up around 175 points, running at 4.4 GHz. This compares to 141 points Intel’s brand new Arrow Lake CPU 5.7GHz and 139 points AMD Ryzen 9 9950XIt also has a maximum boost clock of 5.7GHz.

If you normalize these figures by clock speed, you’ll see that the Apple chip has 60% better IPC than Intel or AMD CPUs. 60 percent blood loss! If Intel released a new CPU with 60% better IPC tomorrow, we wouldn’t believe it.

Of course, Cinebench is just one metric. However, in other tests, Apple silicon appears to have a similar IPC advantage. Regardless, there’s absolutely no doubt that Apple’s M Series chips have much better IPC than chips from AMD or Intel. And the new M4 Pro chip has 10 high-performance cores. Ahh.

Next is memory bandwidth. Intel’s latest Lunar Lake laptop chip achieves around 135 GB/s for raw bandwidth shared between the CPU and GPU. AMD’s Ryzen AI 300 series, codenamed Strix Point, also has a similar 128-bit bus and memory support, so it’s about the same level. However, the M4 Pro reaches 273 GB/s; which is basically twice as much as any existing x86 laptop or handheld chip.

This is important because bandwidth is critical to GPU performance. Of course, where this comparison gets really tricky and some argue that the wheels throw off the whole concept is GPU performance.

But on paper, the M3 Pro has raw FP17 performance of around 16 TFLOPS. Nvidia RTX 4070 laptop chip It runs at 15.6 FP16 TFLOPS. This is by no means certain. But this gives you an idea of ​​the scale of shader performance of the 20-core GPU in the M4 Pro.

It’s very difficult to tell how the M4 Pro’s hardware ray tracing compares to Nvidia or AMD GPUs. And that’s before we get into Nvidia’s DLSS upscaling, beam reconstruction, and the like. In fact, this is all moot because there are already very few decent games compiled and optimized for Apple silicon.

The other major objection would be power consumption. The M4 Pro will definitely find its way into MacBook laptops. But is it reasonable for a handset? Apple has not released power consumption figures for the chip. But in testing, the old M3 Pro had a low power mode that exceeded 30W for the GPU and CPU combined, dropping performance by only a few percentage points compared to the chip’s standard power mode.

AMD’s Strix Point has a maximum TDP of 30W, while Intel’s Lunar Lake goes up to 37W. But under full load both of these chips will consume slightly more. As for handhelds, e.g. Asus’ ROG Ally handheld It has a 25W Turbo mode with battery power. So, an M4 Pro with a handheld form factor seems out of the question.

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Moreover, when it comes to battery life, Apple’s laptops tend to absolutely blow most PC laptops away. Apple rates the new 14-inch MacBook Pro at 22 hours. This is unlikely to be realistic. But probably 15 hours. Show me a half-decent PC gaming laptop with this kind of battery life.

Now, I completely understand the objections to such thought experiments. This is all academic because very few games have been made for MacOS and you can’t run Windows natively on Apple silicon. To be clear, I’m not remotely arguing that it would make sense to actually try to play games on the M4 Pro.

Instead, I’m saying that Apple’s silicon shows how much other chipmakers leave on the table when it comes to performance and efficiency. In other words, how does it make sense for Apple to produce CPU cores with much higher IPC than AMD and Intel, to give just one example? Absolutely, absolutely it should be the other way around. AMD and Intel are CPU core experts, that’s what they exist to create.

Anyway, it’s been a bit of a frustrating few months, with Intel’s disappointing Arrow Lake CPUs and AMD’s merely okay new Zen 5 chips. And when you look at some of what Apple has accomplished with its new M4 chips, you have to wonder what AMD and Intel’s CPU engineers are really trying to do.