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

447 points stephenheron | 1 comments | 25 Aug 25 21:50 UTC | HN request time: 0.327s | source

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

1. 76SlashDolphin ◴[26 Aug 25 12:25 UTC] No.45025580[source]▶
There's a lot of trash talking of x86 here but I feel like it's not x86 or Intel/AMD that are the problem for the simple reason that Chromebooks exist. If you've ever used a Chromebook with the Linux VM turned on, they can basically run everything you can run in Linux, don't get hot unless you actually run something demanding, have very good idle power usage, and actually sleep properly. All this while running on the same i5 that would overheat and fail to sleep in Windows / default Linux distros. This means that it is very much possible to have an x86 get similar runtimes and heat output as an M Series Mac, you just need two things:

- A properly written firmware. All Chromebooks are required to use Coreboot and have very strict requirements on the quality of the implementation set by Google. Windows laptops don't have that and very often have very annoying firmware problems, even in the best cases like Thinkpads and Frameworks. Even on samples from those good brands, just the s0ix self-tester has personally given me glaring failures in basic firmware capabilities.

- A properly tuned kernel and OS. ChromeOS is Gentoo under the hood and every core service is afaik recompiled for the CPU architecture with as many optimisations enabled. I'm pretty sure that the kernel is also tweaked for battery life and desktop usage. Default installations of popular distros will struggle to support this because they come pre-compiled and they need to support devices other than ultrabooks.

Unfortunately, it seems like Google is abandoning the project altogether, seeing as they're dropping Steam support and merging ChromeOS into Android. I wish they'd instead make another Pixelbook, work with Adobe and other professional software companies to make their software compatible with Proton + Wine, and we'd have a real competitor to the M1 Macbook Air, which nothing outside of Apple can match still.