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leman

macrumors Core
Oct 14, 2008
19,521
19,675
The only thing is, will Apple fumbles around as competitors catching up? That's the thing the Apple sometimes does , stumbling on its own due to form over function, or some focus on virtue signalling. Is Apple can maintain their momentum, it would be tough for Intel to catch up unless they have a breakthrough in architectural change.

We need to see more products to understand what Apples plans are. It’s still not clear whether the M1 lineup is representative for their long term strategy or whether it was a one time test of horizontal scaling technology. I still think that if Apple is serious about desktop their next step will be vertical scaling and possibly new generation of high-perf cores. It’s also notable that they have been steadily improving their E-core technology every year.
 

ahurst

macrumors 6502
Oct 12, 2021
410
815
I can help… Being a strong advocate of any benchmark is silly.


And test suites such as PCMark attempt to more realistically mimic a user’s variety of tasks. But let's face it, even their test gauges a fraction of probable workloads.

The only way it really works is when you cater to a specific audience. Even then, for example, organizations such as GamersNexus appear to use per-game integrated benchmarks or replicated sample play rather than tools like Time Spy or Heaven/Valley/Superposition. Another example is how/why PugetBench is an automation add-on (e.g., plugin) for actual apps.

Basically, there’s no valid way to gauge the general performance of a system. Doing so is fine for entertainment, however, not reliable in practical comparison.
To quote statistician Richard McElreath, “all [statistical] models are wrong, some [statistical] models are useful”.

Obviously, it’s impossible to create a benchmark that accurately predicts performance on every existing workflow into a simple comparable number: different tasks have different demands (cache use, vectorization, heavy RAM use, etc.), so a general benchmark (like Geekbench or SPEC or even Cinebench) is going to have limited predictive power for how fast a specific task will be between systems.

However, limited predictive power can still be very useful! Even if Geekbench performance only correlates 70% with performance on my specific EEG preprocessing pipeline, that’s still very valuable information given that Ars Technica or even niche YouTube reviewers probably aren’t going to test any of the scientific/statistical software where my computer does most of its heavy lifting.

As long as they can tell us *something* about general performance, general benchmarks are going to be useful, even if they’re often “wrong”.
 
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name99

macrumors 68020
Jun 21, 2004
2,410
2,318
Intel changed it's strategy to mobile first. All the upcoming advancement in architecture are launching first for laptops.
Intel 4 (Meteor Lake) cores will launch in Q1/23 for mobile computers, end of 23 for Desktop PCs. Same goes for Intel 3, 20A & 18A.
It's unclear that this represents "strategy". Current Intel seems to be in a constant scramble to try to ship (some version of) what Marketing promised two years ago.
Meaning that what will ship for any given new product (laptop?, desktop?, HEDT?) seems primarily determined by what they're actually able to put together in non-trivial numbers.
- If the yields and performance are low, sell it as some specialty part to some country that sells very few and claim victory.
- If the yields are low and energy is bad, but performance is high, start with an HEDT part priced so high you don't sell many.
- If the gating item is your CPU tiles (rather than TSMC's GPU or IO tiles) sell the version that includes lots of GPU and IO per CPU (probably mid-range desktop). etc etc.

This is not "strategy", it's simply doing whatever you can to keep up with promises you made two years ago. (Meaning, uh, perhaps if you **** and made fewer promises way in advance, you could ACTUALLY implement strategy...)
 

MrGunny94

macrumors 65816
Dec 3, 2016
1,148
675
Malaga, Spain
It's unclear that this represents "strategy". Current Intel seems to be in a constant scramble to try to ship (some version of) what Marketing promised two years ago.
Meaning that what will ship for any given new product (laptop?, desktop?, HEDT?) seems primarily determined by what they're actually able to put together in non-trivial numbers.
- If the yields and performance are low, sell it as some specialty part to some country that sells very few and claim victory.
- If the yields are low and energy is bad, but performance is high, start with an HEDT part priced so high you don't sell many.
- If the gating item is your CPU tiles (rather than TSMC's GPU or IO tiles) sell the version that includes lots of GPU and IO per CPU (probably mid-range desktop). etc etc.

This is not "strategy", it's simply doing whatever you can to keep up with promises you made two years ago. (Meaning, uh, perhaps if you **** and made fewer promises way in advance, you could ACTUALLY implement strategy...)
Well if we take a look at their updates to Meteor Lake in the Linux Kernel 6.1, we can definitely see that they are giving a hell of a focus On the mobility devices.

Same can be said about AMD on their P core and cache rescheduling being done.


 
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maflynn

macrumors Haswell
Original poster
May 3, 2009
73,682
43,740
We need to see more products to understand what Apples plans are
This is the great unknown, seeing what M2 pro/max/ultra will look like and/or seeing true pro level desktop computers. The studio is really the only desktop on arm that is "pro"

People are aching to see what an ARM Mac Pro will look like
 

ArkSingularity

macrumors 6502a
Mar 5, 2022
928
1,130
It's unclear that this represents "strategy". Current Intel seems to be in a constant scramble to try to ship (some version of) what Marketing promised two years ago.
Meaning that what will ship for any given new product (laptop?, desktop?, HEDT?) seems primarily determined by what they're actually able to put together in non-trivial numbers.
- If the yields and performance are low, sell it as some specialty part to some country that sells very few and claim victory.
- If the yields are low and energy is bad, but performance is high, start with an HEDT part priced so high you don't sell many.
- If the gating item is your CPU tiles (rather than TSMC's GPU or IO tiles) sell the version that includes lots of GPU and IO per CPU (probably mid-range desktop). etc etc.

This is not "strategy", it's simply doing whatever you can to keep up with promises you made two years ago. (Meaning, uh, perhaps if you **** and made fewer promises way in advance, you could ACTUALLY implement strategy...)
I kinda want to give them a couple more years before I really fully make up my mind. Pat Gelsinger has only been back for about a year and a half. New CPU designs take a few years to go from design to fab/market, so the stuff that they are releasing today is really stuff that they began engineering in ~2019 or so. They are more or less still releasing stuff that was probably already in the pipeline before Gelsinger took over.

My hope is that this is all just a strategy to buy time, because I definitely hope to see them develop higher IPC cores. They are achieving jaw-dropping performance with insanely high clock speeds on Raptor Lake (and those performance numbers are truly impressive), but with that kind of power consumption, there is no way these top-of-the-line parts will ever be practical for laptops and mobile users. You can't put a 250W TDP CPU into a thinkpad (sorry, marketing department. I don't care what tdpDown is on paper. 😂)
 
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leman

macrumors Core
Oct 14, 2008
19,521
19,675
My hope is that they are working on higher IPC cores. They are achieving jaw-dropping performance with insanely high clock speeds on Raptor Lake (and those performance numbers are truly impressive), but with that kind of power consumption, there is no way these top-of-the-line parts will ever be practical for laptops and mobile users.

They just released the higher IPC core in 2021. I would't expect a new P-core from Intel until at least 2025-2026. Will it be able to deliver better power efficiency? Intel would probably need to start completely from scratch to achieve that.
 
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MrGunny94

macrumors 65816
Dec 3, 2016
1,148
675
Malaga, Spain
Honestly I'd rather have the M* Pro chips be focused on delivering more efficiency and having full performance focus on the Max chips.

We could get some really good battery improvements on the 14" Pro and 16" Pro that way.
 
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pshufd

macrumors G4
Oct 24, 2013
10,146
14,573
New Hampshire

deconstruct60

macrumors G5
Mar 10, 2009
12,493
4,053
Intel laying off 11% of their workforce. Odd that this is after getting a ton of money from Congress. I wouldn't be surprised if AMD has something in the works too.


Fire marketing sales folks and hire more fab technicians . There is no real conflict there with the CHIPs act. Suppose to be trying to create more manufacturing jobs. Not composing more spin. If creating humongous bucketloads of spin was real manufacturing the USA would be king of the world. ( i.e., that non stop political ads on TV right now and for next 4 weeks. )
 

maflynn

macrumors Haswell
Original poster
May 3, 2009
73,682
43,740
Intel laying off 11% of their workforce. Odd that this is after getting a ton of money from Congress. I wouldn't be surprised if AMD has something in the works too.
Just me speaking without knowing any details, but i suspect the layoffs are due to softening market and more global recession type fears then anything specifically wrong at Intel. Other sectors are already laying people off, so while this is disheartening (I feel bad for those who are impacted), its not the last we hear about layoffs
 
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