@rygorous@mastodon.gamedev.place
Post #2409961
2025-09-09 05:14 UTC
@JamesWidman@mastodon.social @steve@discuss.systems @regehr@mastodon.social M1-M4 are not substantially more power-efficient than all x86s as of 2020 (and note that this gap has closed a lot since, especially with Lunar Lake) because ARM has magic power efficiency juice, but rather because their uArch (not ISA) decided to go for higher IPC, lower clock frequencies.
If you compare vs. AMD or Intel (both of which, conveniently, also have all their recent compute tiles on TSMC, same as Apple!) you can see that.
Replies (1)
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@rygorous@mastodon.gamedev.place 2025-09-09 05:20
@JamesWidman@mastodon.social @steve@discuss.systems @regehr@mastodon.social Mind, it's not exactly like you decide to "just go for IPC", that's not easy! But especially near the high end of what a design supports, power consumption grows exorbitantly. Power use scales with something like the 3rd power of clock frequency near the top. So 10% higher boost clock = 33% higher power draw. Those last few 100MHz _really_ cost you.