HACKER Q&A
📣 retskrad

Is Apple Silicon on desktop a reasonable proposition?


On mobile and laptop front, Apple's chips are the worlds most advanced chips because of their performance per watt. On desktop, where efficiency is of no concern and all you want is performance, it puts the whole Apple Silicon on desktop in question. Are people who buy desktop Mac products getting their money's worth compared to buying a desktop PC?

  👤 walterbell Accepted Answer ✓
> On desktop, where efficiency is of no concern

Performance-per-watt is a concern for buyers of electricity.

👤 smoldesu
I mean, even on the laptop front Apple's performance-per-watt is in question. In Blender, the ~80w 2070 MaxQ performs roughly the same as the ~90w M2 Max. That's a pretty impressive showing for a 12nm dGPU versus a 5nm SOC, and things only get worse when you bring in the newest laptop chips Nvidia has. Bit of a moot point, but it's worth mentioning.

I don't think its unreasonable, though. Apple has never been about putting the highest specs in a box, Apple users were prepared for M1 to not dominate every scoreboard. The problem is more that their SOC-style approach isn't very effective for desktops. It helps you make cute workstations like the Mac Studio (which looks straight off Minisforum), but it's obviously hamstrung for larger tower-style distributed boxes. It's even evident in their lineup - there were a lot of rumors about an M1 Extreme that got cancelled for various reasons. It honestly just looks like they're hitting the limits of phone-style SOC manufacturing, which is good in some places (latency, integration, power management) but bad in others (cramped die, bottlenecked IO, thermal distribution).

👤 ksec
>where efficiency is of no concern and all you want is performance

That is not strictly true. If you allow 10W per core ( The A16 CPU Core @ 3.5Ghz only uses ~5W max in case anyone is wondering ), even a 32 Core CPU puts you at 320W. That is excluding Memory controller and I/O. Worth remember Apple's CPU is single thread only. Compared to AMD / Intel x86 counterparts which has 2 thread per Core. So once you factor in multithread usage, which is what most of the performance difference are coming from on desktop. It still matters.

There is a difference argument if you have a need of 300W CPU and 500W GPU though.

👤 brucethemoose2
> efficiency is of no concern

Its not that simple. Perf/W has an influence on absolute max performance.

Anyway its Apples to oranges. Mac desktops fly in workloads x86 desktops chug in, and vice versa. The UI is different, and the application choice is different.

👤 coldtea
>On desktop, where efficiency is of no concern and all you want is performance, it puts the whole Apple Silicon on desktop in question.

Does it? The Mac Studio has shown quite great performance.

Also, who said that "all you want is performance"? People also want a quiet desktop, people in certain fields (music, graphic design, video, but also tons of developers) want the macOS combination of little fuss mostly-just-works, as opposed to the "just change distro/tweak/cross your fingers" with Linux (especially as you have more demanding needs from third party hardware, multimedia and so on), UNIX underpinnings, availability of all essential commercial software, and it being more streamlined).