Quote from: davidm on September 25, 2023, 14:01:40As if anyone really benefits from marginally faster CPUs. It's such a joke, PC users chasing diminishing returns egged on by review sites. Let me guess, it boots faster?
NPUs, GPUs, memory transfer speed, efficiency are what's needed. I'm not an Apple guy, but their chips are great at those things. The x86 market is embarassing. I mean at last Intel is trying, AMD is just being flaky with their NPU.
Intel is trying what? Wasting power for nothing? Just to claim clock speeds as high as 6 GHz? Their CPUs need twice the energy under full load to achieve the same performance as AMD CPUs.
It's not the x86 market that is embarrassing. It's Intel that is embarrassing. But at least they try to catch up to AMD in the next years, for better competition. With more efficient uarchs and multi chiplet designs. But it's still embarrassing that they will use other fabs, like from TSMC, instead of their own fabs.
OTOH, ARM is more embarrassing than x86 right now. There is Apple ... and no one else who is even close. Just some poor processors for smartphones. Or some server processors for niche segments. It's virtually a non competitive market right now. And Apple knows it, selling way too overpriced. I mean you can easily configure a Mac Studio for ~10k. 64GB more RAM easily cost you ~1k, a 4TB SSD cost you over 1k on such a system. WTF? ^^
And who needs GPUs? No one except high end gamers. Which are quite irrelevant for the whole market. Most companies and private people still need good CPUs more than anything else. Because they simply don't have the workloads for highly parallelized special hardware. The nature of many daily apps is having a primary thread which is run on a CPU. And the better it runs ST the better your workflow. If you ever used a crappy Atom based Intel system you know what I am talking about. And that won't change anytime soon.
Apple can be quite good at that. But they also need tons of transistors and the latest process nodes for it. Resulting in quite expensive designs. And outside the advertised Apple scenarios the M1/2 processors also can be quite poor.
AMD is actually doing better than Apple and Intel. They have less expensive designs than Apple, offering more than competitive performance and efficiency. And much more efficient designs than Intel at similar price points. Zen 5 will be another significant improvement for AMD. Increasing per thread performance and efficiency drastically. But because the design will be a lot wider too, like M1 or Alder Lake before, let's see how expensive it will be. So, from a technological point of view Zen 5 will be world class. But the economical side might be another story.