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Ask HN: Why hasn't x86 caught up with Apple M series?

447 points stephenheron | 6 comments | 25 Aug 25 21:50 UTC | HN request time: 0.81s | source | bottom

Hi,

My daily workhorse is a M1 Pro that I purchased on release date, It has been one of the best tech purchases I have made, even now it really deals with anything I throw at it. My daily work load is regularly having a Android emulator, iOS simulator and a number of Dockers containers running simultaneously and I never hear the fans, battery life has taken a bit of a hit but it is still very respectable.

I wanted a new personal laptop, and I was debating between a MacBook Air or going for a Framework 13 with Linux. I wanted to lean into learning something new so went with the Framework and I must admit I am regretting it a bit.

The M1 was released back in 2020 and I bought the Ryzen AI 340 which is one of the newest 2025 chips from AMD, so AMD has 5 years of extra development and I had expected them to get close to the M1 in terms of battery efficiency and thermals.

The Ryzen is using a TSMC N4P process compared to the older N5 process, I managed to find a TSMC press release showing the performance/efficiency gains from the newer process: “When compared to N5, N4P offers users a reported +11% performance boost or a 22% reduction in power consumption. Beyond that, N4P can offer users a 6% increase in transistor density over N5”

I am sorely disappointed, using the Framework feels like using an older Intel based Mac. If I open too many tabs in Chrome I can feel the bottom of the laptop getting hot, open a YouTube video and the fans will often spin up.

Why haven’t AMD/Intel been able to catch up? Is x86 just not able to keep up with the ARM architecture? When can we expect a x86 laptop chip to match the M1 in efficiency/thermals?!

To be fair I haven’t tried Windows on the Framework yet it might be my Linux setup being inefficient.

Cheers, Stephen

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ben-schaaf ◴[26 Aug 25 07:03 UTC] No.45023206[source]▶
Battery efficiency comes from a million little optimizations in the technology stack, most of which comes down to using the CPU as little as possible. As such the instruction set architecture and process node aren't usually that important when it comes to your battery life.

If you fully load the CPU and calculate how much energy a AI340 needs to perform a fixed workload and compare that to a M1 you'll probably find similar results, but that only matters for your battery life if you're doing things like blender renders, big compiles or gaming.

Take for example this battery life gaming benchmark for an M1 Air: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jYSMfRKsmOU. 2.5 hours is about what you'd expect from an x86 laptop, possibly even worse than the fw13 you're comparing here. But turn down the settings so that the M1 CPU and GPU are mostly idle, and bam you get 10+ hours.

Another example would be a ~5 year old mobile qualcomm chip. It's a worse process node than an AMD AI340, much much slower and significantly worse performance per watt, and yet it barely gets hot and sips power.

All that to say: M1 is pretty fast, but the reason the battery life is better has to do with everything other than the CPU cores. That's what AMD and Intel are missing.

> If I open too many tabs in Chrome I can feel the bottom of the laptop getting hot, open a YouTube video and the fans will often spin up.

It's a fairly common issue on Linux to be missing hardware acceleration, especially for video decoding. I've had to enable gpu video decoding on my fw16 and haven't noticed the fans on youtube.

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1. pzo ◴[26 Aug 25 08:01 UTC] No.45023603[source]▶
> most of which comes down to using the CPU as little as possible.

it least on mobile platform apple advocate the other way with race to sleep - do calculation as fast as you can with powerful cores so that whole chip can go back to sleep earlier and more often take naps.

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2. creshal ◴[26 Aug 25 08:59 UTC] No.45024063[source]▶
Intel stipulated the same under the name HUGI (Hurry Up and Go Idle) about 15 years ago when ultrabooks were the new hot thing.

But when Apple says it, software devs actually listen.

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3. nikanj ◴[26 Aug 25 11:55 UTC] No.45025284[source]▶
And then Microsoft adds an animated news tracker to the left corner of the start bar, making sure the cpu never gets to idle.
4. int_19h ◴[26 Aug 25 17:17 UTC] No.45029521[source]▶
Peer pressure. When everybody else does it and you don't, your app sticks out like a sore thumb and makes users unhappy.

The other aspect of it is that paid software is more prevalent in macOS land, and the prices are generally higher than on Windows. But the flip side of that is that user feedback is taken more seriously.

5. ben-schaaf ◴[27 Aug 25 04:25 UTC] No.45035451[source]▶
Race to sleep is all about using the CPU as little as possible. Given that the modern AMD chips are faster than Apple M1 this clearly does not account for the disparity in battery life.
6. redwall_hp ◴[28 Aug 25 02:33 UTC] No.45047697[source]▶
Apple was talking about batching tasks for battery life back when they shipped Grand Central Dispatch back in 2009. It was a major part of that year's WWDC keynote. Race to Zero was also a major part of how they designed networking for iOS.