The new Apple M2 is being touted as a much faster SoC than its competitors, but we'll have to see that for ourselves as we test it against the best parts from Intel and AMD in the Windows world.
Apple M2 Review: Can It Keep Up with AMD and Intel?
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I'm actually very surprised at how well AMD's CPUs are doing in this category. Would love to find a good 6900HS laptop later this year.
dangh
Posts: 1,246 +2,032
Given m2 is one technological node ahead, new AMD cpus will push the low-power perfromance even further. With the market getting back more to normal and shortages of silicon being slowly dealt with, we might have an interesting next year.
The difference is the M2 is on a smaller more denser node than the 6800U, so of course it's going to beat it in some tasks. Apple can afford to be on TSMC's latest and greatest nodes.
kiwigraeme
Posts: 1,996 +1,408
For power efficiency seems great - but AMD and Intel will be on better nodes soon .
As for performance - it's good - but not this super thing Apple raves about
Imagine running Apple Native stuff it's excellent giving it's quick start tricks - probably great laptop for consuming , web, some home video editing
Can't see price comparisons - depends on Apple config I suppose
again horses for courses - I have zero need of it - road warriors , students may get good value out of it
I suppose most of us PC users would want an expensive laptop to work with our games library etc - I don't game on laptops - but many strategy games probably work well on laptops
I just don't see compelling reason for someone in any camp to change
As for performance - it's good - but not this super thing Apple raves about
Imagine running Apple Native stuff it's excellent giving it's quick start tricks - probably great laptop for consuming , web, some home video editing
Can't see price comparisons - depends on Apple config I suppose
again horses for courses - I have zero need of it - road warriors , students may get good value out of it
I suppose most of us PC users would want an expensive laptop to work with our games library etc - I don't game on laptops - but many strategy games probably work well on laptops
I just don't see compelling reason for someone in any camp to change
Fulljack
Posts: 116 +97
Even when AMD moves to TSMC N5 next year, I still doubt AMD nor Intel would have the same efficiency as Apple M1 or M2. that's just how different the combination of custom Arm silicon with vertically integrated OS compared to x86 CPU with Windows.
still, what matters is that M2 are better if you're video or photo editor. but x86 are far more cheaper and still fast enough.
still, what matters is that M2 are better if you're video or photo editor. but x86 are far more cheaper and still fast enough.
AnilD
Posts: 104 +146
Excellent review as usual. Apple has two big things going here: 1) Killer efficiency / battery life when not in full load (most of the time on a mobile system), 2) Specialized hardware that speeds up certain processes, like image/video manipulation, which caters directly to a group of Mac power users.
Considering Apple was not a chipmaker a few short years ago, pretty impressive stuff.
Considering Apple was not a chipmaker a few short years ago, pretty impressive stuff.
Now let's see that "impressive" part:
- Clock speed only 3.5 GHz, pathetic.
- Non-expandable memory, that's under all metrics.
- Do we even need to talk about how "well" Apple handles backwards compatibility?
Considering those points, M.2 is overall pretty much crap.
You compare on performance, not clock speed. It's not Nov. 2000 any more with the P4. If it was a 7GHz CPU with the exact same performance and power draw, it would not change the assessment of the laptop in the slightest.
Non-expandable memory is crap but just as much crap is the initial asking price and upgrade prices.
I assume you mean that Apple' backwards compatibility with Rosetta 2 is pretty good. Should be as they have quite a bit of experience with these transitions.
Non-expandable memory is crap but just as much crap is the initial asking price and upgrade prices.
I assume you mean that Apple' backwards compatibility with Rosetta 2 is pretty good. Should be as they have quite a bit of experience with these transitions.
I already saw what was on my mind. Apple's silicon is not ahead at all with its 5nm...... AMD will be at least on par & in most areas faster & even maybe more efficient when in 5nm. Intel's fastest though not the most efficiency of TSMC still, though, Intel's most efficient in idle & in full load not behind (most can't break 2h of laptop battery life barrier).. We hope the change for intel will come after Intel 4 coming.. Apple's GPU was the best part of their chips & kind of impressive for me, but they don't allow dGPU...
Inthenstus
Posts: 168 +264
If I could run every application on a Mac I could Windows without a significant performance hit if do it. Prices would also need to normalize as well. Then I’d switch, screw Windows.
M2 is only for laptops. Intel and AMD chips are for laptops, desktops and servers. AMD and Intel CPUs are high performance chips, M2 is not. M2 looks good on power consumption but low clock speed one reason for it. For that reason, comparison is not really fair.
Pentium 4 didn't even reach 4 GHz without overclocking.
Because M2 has integrated memory, CPUs are really not comparable.
Motorola 68K and PowerPC compatibilities pretty much suck tbh. Intel and AMD x86 compatibility is "pretty good". Again, comparison is not fair.
Guillermo Belli
Posts: 86 +115
Performance and efficiency is decent for the Apple CPUs, but you need an Apple computer with MacOS, so it's a definitive no for me.
I'd say those 3 talking points are pretty weak.
First, who cares what the clock speed is? It's like comparing cars and saying, this car is better because it has 8 cylinders. But the other car is a bi-turbo 6 and will blow the doors off the 8 in the quarter mile. But feel good because you have 2 extra cylinders
Second, get the memory you need when you buy the device. In a few years when you need to upgrade you'll likely need to upgrade the CPU or GPU or SSDs as well and you'll buy a different computer then. The Apple laptops can be bought with all the memory you need today. You can get up to 64G on a MB Pro. That's plenty for these devices.
Not sure what you mean about backward compatibility but MacOS on ARM has fared far better than Windows on ARM. Windows RT anyone? Apple has a pretty good track record of supporting older devices. Microsoft, on the other hand, obsoleted millions of PCs over a TPM module, now that's backwards compatibility for you.
The M2 and it's higher performance variants will clearly come to desktop in expanded configurations just like the M1 has, and the performance will be compared with Intel and AMD's desktops at that time. And that's the point of the low clock speed, to get the majority of the performance while using less power. Though these tests show that all these CPUs are roughly on par with each other within a given power envelope, Apple's advantage isn't huge except for battery life, which is a great pro in a laptop.
Motorola 68k is a quarter century in the past, PPC merely 16 years ago. I guess I don't see your point as Apple's compatibility for these transitions was seamless and close to 100% if not exactly 100%.
They are very strong.
High clock speed is still about only way to have good overall single thread performance. Another thing is that low clock speed allows to make smaller and cooler CPU. With higher max clock speed M2 would not be so efficient for sure.
Considering what people upgrade, memory and storage upgrades are most common. And again, not expandable memory is one reason why M2 is so fast. Again, with expandable memory, M2 would be bigger and hotter. And it wouldn't really make sense anyway.
Apple used Motorola 68K CPU's at start. Not much to say about compatibility with those.
This matters because backwards compatibility cost die space and makes CPU less efficient. I thought AMD and Intel makes CPUs, not Microsoft...
Exactly, majority of performance using less power. PC Gaming Master Race does care about extreme performance, not compromise between power and speed.
Apple has efficiency advantage but considering everything (mobile only, low clock speed, lack backwards compatibility, node advantage, non-expandable memory...) it's hard to see M.2 impressive. Not to mention M.2 name totally sucks.
How M.2 handles 68K software? Pretty badly I expect.
There is point since x86 CPUs still have at least partial support for instructions introduced 44 years ago. That does waste die space, make CPU design more difficult and lowers efficiency. If M.2 also had support for 68K instructions, it would be bigger, hotter and slower. That's the point.
Not very
No one buys a laptop based on CPU clock speed. No one. No one cares about clock speed, what they care about is whether their applications run fast or not. Clock speed is just geek-speak and is right up there with amplifiers whose volume knob goes to 11.
PCGamer rates memory upgrades as a paltry 2.93 out of 5. Basically, "Helpful but not huge" For laptops, memory and storage are generally the only things you can upgrade. If you buy enough memory to start you don't need to upgrade and when you need to upgrade you'll likely want a better CPU/GPU combination, so this point is not that big of a deal. Buy the RAM you need up front.
Motorola 68K? HOLY COW. You are going way back. It only serves to make your point weaker.
You missed the point of backwards compatibility. No one wants to run 44 yr old code or even 20 year old code.When I bought a MacBook 2 years ago, guess what? It ran ALL the code that I needed to run, including ALL the apps that I run on my Windows machine (with the exception of games). I wasn't trying to run Mine Sweeper from Windows 3.0.
Rocky4040
Posts: 198 +258
I'm not totally sure what he meant but maybe he was referring to how Apple dumps support for an OS version (sub version) for almost every hardware refresh they expect you to buy either new hardware when a new OS comes out even though it's the same OS but the sub version number is changed to a newer sub version OS 10 was famous for that happening or if you have pretty current hardware but Apple comes out releases a new OS again same OS but with some feature upgrades and sub version is newer but it won't run on your current hardware even though it's most likely is only a few years old and could run the newer version of the OS just fine.
I worked in the computer industry for many years and seen al sorts of things that bothered me with these companies and that was one of the things Apple did that just seemed like a huge money grab. Of coarse I seen other companies doing sneaky stuff too so it is not just Apple it's pretty much all of them. Intel is a company that likes to force Socket changes way to often just because they can.
AMD likes to do stupid small refreshes on their GPU's give it a new name and expect people to flock to the stores or online retailers and pretty much buy the same old GPU but hey it's got a new model number so it's got to be MORE better right lol. I am not just picking on one company here I decided to pick on a few of the worst offenders here.
kiwigraeme
Posts: 1,996 +1,408
I just looked at the prices for 8 incredible GB of memory and 512 astoundingly large GBs of storage
It's crazy expensive - If I was apple I would buy Apple MacBook Pro 13.3" with Touch Bar - 10th Gen Intel Core i5 - 16GB Memory - 1TB SSD for 2/3s the price
The M1 pro with 1TB was even more stupidly expensive
Would make more sense to buy Windows/Linux laptop + Iatest ipad 2022 for cheaper - you get Apples apps , media consumption - You get a Laptop that can run games , do documents etc .
Really paying that amount of money as a main device and it can't do games in any significant amount
I could build a power PC( basic case etc ) + Ipad 2022 for same price - GPUs are coming down.
Let's be truthful most Apple M2 devices with just be web browsing, media consumption, emails and social media - yes for media creation is great - but most grandma/grandpas don't care about that .
That's why you get tiny memory and SDD apple knows it's market - is not power users
If I was doing serious video work I would want 2 - 2tb M2 drives to handle 50GB plus files
It's crazy expensive - If I was apple I would buy Apple MacBook Pro 13.3" with Touch Bar - 10th Gen Intel Core i5 - 16GB Memory - 1TB SSD for 2/3s the price
The M1 pro with 1TB was even more stupidly expensive
Would make more sense to buy Windows/Linux laptop + Iatest ipad 2022 for cheaper - you get Apples apps , media consumption - You get a Laptop that can run games , do documents etc .
Really paying that amount of money as a main device and it can't do games in any significant amount
I could build a power PC( basic case etc ) + Ipad 2022 for same price - GPUs are coming down.
Let's be truthful most Apple M2 devices with just be web browsing, media consumption, emails and social media - yes for media creation is great - but most grandma/grandpas don't care about that .
That's why you get tiny memory and SDD apple knows it's market - is not power users
If I was doing serious video work I would want 2 - 2tb M2 drives to handle 50GB plus files
Not sure what you're saying here as actual numbers (or dates?) would clarify your points.
Monterey (current) supports mainly 2015 models and later, plus the 2014 Mini and 2013 Mac Pro
Big Sur (previous) supports mainly 2013 models and later, but strangely the 2014 iMac and later
Catalina (previous to that) supports all 2012 and later models
So about a 7-year direct support cycle, and Apple releases App and Security support for the current and previous 2 annual OS releases so those 2012 models on Catalina are currently supported by Apple, though they cannot run the most recent version of the OS.
7-10 years of support seems reasonable but others may disagree.
You really cannot make modern CPU that has low clock speed and high performance at same time.
RAM tend to get cheaper over time. Also it's not uncommon that RAM modules also get bigger. Upgrading RAM is cheaper and sometimes only way to even get maximum amount of memory supported. Not to mention memory pricing changes a lot, upgrage could save Big money.
AMD and Intel could easily make CPUs that are faster, more efficient and cheaper. Just supporting 64 bit software only. But guess what, both still support around 40 year old (32-bit, 386 era) software on hardware level. For example legendary game Doom is already 30 year old and still runs on modern CPU's without special emulation. AMD introduced x86-64 just 19 years ago btw.
But of course, since You don't run old code, nobody else does neither.
I'm saying that Apple drop CPU support for older instruction sets quite often, offering only some sort of emulation that is either slow or very slow. Dropping support for older software makes CPU design much easier but for Some reasons AMD and Intel still choose to support decades old instuction sets on hardware level. Apple does not.
That's one fact why M.2 is not so impressive...
Mr Majestyk
Posts: 2,058 +1,903
I think come Zen 5 and Arrow Lake AMD and Intel will be much more competitive on a performance per watt basis. Raptor Lake mobile will just really add more e-cores and can't see power usage of mobile RL dropping much at all. Zen 4 APU's might do a bit better power efficiency and offer either much higher performance at similar power to Rembrandt or much lower power at probably still better performance.
If Apple didn't have their heads shoved up their backside and so isolationist and sold these SoC to other parties, I would buy an M2 (Pro) based laptop any day. Even if it ran Linux that would be awesome. Instead I will be getting a Phoenix based laptop next year and hopefully I can uninstall windows 11 to go back to 10.
If Apple didn't have their heads shoved up their backside and so isolationist and sold these SoC to other parties, I would buy an M2 (Pro) based laptop any day. Even if it ran Linux that would be awesome. Instead I will be getting a Phoenix based laptop next year and hopefully I can uninstall windows 11 to go back to 10.
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