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

447 points stephenheron | 27 comments | 25 Aug 25 21:50 UTC | HN request time: 0.001s | 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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jonwinstanley ◴[26 Aug 25 09:54 UTC] No.45024390[source]▶
A huge reason for the low power usage is the iPhone.

Apple spent years incrementally improving efficiency and performance of their chips for phones. Intel and AMD were more desktop based so power efficiency wasnt the goal. When Apple's chips got so good they could transition into laptops, x86 wasn't in the same ballpark.

Also the iPhone is the most lucrative product of all time (I think) and Apple poured a tonne of that money into R&D and taking the top engineers from Intel, AMD, and ARM, building one of the best silicon teams.

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1. skeezyboy ◴[26 Aug 25 12:54 UTC] No.45025876[source]▶
> and Apple poured a tonne of that money into R&D and taking the top engineers from Intel, AMD, and ARM, building one of the best silicon teams.

how much silicon did Apple actually create? I thought they outsourced all the components?

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2. brokencode ◴[26 Aug 25 13:11 UTC] No.45026055[source]▶
Outsourced to who? The only companies with the engineers you’d need are the other CPU makers like Intel, AMD, Qualcomm, and Nvidia. And none of them make a CPU as efficient as Apple does.
replies(2): >>45026430 #>>45027035 #
3. ChrisGreenHeur ◴[26 Aug 25 13:41 UTC] No.45026430[source]▶
Arm exists, it is unknown how much tech apple gets from Arm.
replies(2): >>45026757 #>>45026820 #
4. fennecbutt ◴[26 Aug 25 14:04 UTC] No.45026757{3}[source]▶
And tsmc (and therefore asml etc), usually apple reserves the newest upcoming node for their own production.
5. brokencode ◴[26 Aug 25 14:09 UTC] No.45026820{3}[source]▶
Arm licenses their designs to everybody. They are okay, but you are never going to make market leading processors by using the Arm designs.
replies(1): >>45027070 #
6. giantrobot ◴[26 Aug 25 14:12 UTC] No.45026848[source]▶
Apple bought PA Semi a long time ago. They have a significant silicon development group. Their architecture license (they were an early investor in ARM) for ARM means they get to basically do whatever they want using the ARM ISA. The SoCs in pretty much all their devices are designed in-house.
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7. twilo ◴[26 Aug 25 14:17 UTC] No.45026909[source]▶
They bought Palo Alto Semiconductor in 2008 which is where all their ARM chip designs came from.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P.A._Semi

8. skeezyboy ◴[26 Aug 25 14:28 UTC] No.45027035[source]▶
cpu yes, but what about the rest of the iphone?
replies(1): >>45031893 #
9. skeezyboy ◴[26 Aug 25 14:30 UTC] No.45027070{4}[source]▶
The M1 and M2 were beating the best-in-class i7 when they were relased IIRC
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10. skeezyboy ◴[26 Aug 25 14:35 UTC] No.45027132[source]▶
what about all the components and sensors
replies(1): >>45029329 #
11. PaulRobinson ◴[26 Aug 25 14:49 UTC] No.45027347{5}[source]▶
Apple took the ARM base design (they licensed it), and then they modified and tweaked it.

You get the ARM ISA, and compilers that work for ARM will compile to Apple Silicon. It's just that the actual hardware you get, is better than the base design, and therefore beats other ARM processors in benchmarks.

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12. ◴[26 Aug 25 14:49 UTC] No.45027349{5}[source]▶
13. diffuse_l ◴[26 Aug 25 15:51 UTC] No.45028232{6}[source]▶
It's more than that. They have an unlimited license to arm designs, and can change them as they see fit, since they were an early investors (or something along those lines). Other manufacturers can't get these terms, or if they can, it will be prohibtly expensive
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14. kube-system ◴[26 Aug 25 16:09 UTC] No.45028498[source]▶
Besides Apple's SoCs they also have made dedicated silicon for secure enclaves, wifi, bluetooth, ultra-wideband, and cellular radios, and motion coprocessors.
15. ryao ◴[26 Aug 25 16:16 UTC] No.45028609{7}[source]▶
Apple has an architectural license that lets them build their own ARM cores:

https://www.electronicsweekly.com/news/business/finance/arm-...

It is very unlikely Apple uses anything from ARM’s core designs, since that would require paying an additional license fee and Apple was able to design superior cores using its architectural license.

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16. simonh ◴[26 Aug 25 17:03 UTC] No.45029329{3}[source]▶
Apple has bought startups with various technologies like Anobit, that developed advanced flash memory controllers, and have funded development efforts by partners. For example Apple worked hand in glove with Sharp to develop the tech for their 5K display panels. They also now have their own cellular chip designs in some models, in their quest for independence from Qualcomm. That’s all from memory, I’m sure there are many more examples.
replies(1): >>45052338 #
17. abc_lisper ◴[26 Aug 25 19:27 UTC] No.45031094{8}[source]▶
Yep, Apple was a significant early investor in ARM. https://appleinsider.com/articles/23/09/05/apple-arm-have-be...
18. brokencode ◴[26 Aug 25 20:24 UTC] No.45031893{3}[source]▶
They design much more in house than any other smartphone brand, except maybe Samsung.

CPU, GPU, neural processor, image signal processor, U1 chip for device tracking, Secure Enclave for biometrics, a 5G modem (only used in the 16e so far)…

They don’t manufacture the chips in house of course. They contract that out to TSMC and other companies.

19. stinkbeetle ◴[26 Aug 25 20:38 UTC] No.45032029{6}[source]▶
> Apple took the ARM base design (they licensed it), and then they modified and tweaked it.

More likely it was derived from PWRficient, or a clean sheet design that took lessons from it.

20. sgerenser ◴[26 Aug 25 21:08 UTC] No.45032363{7}[source]▶
The thing about Apple having a “special license” due to being a partial founder of Arm is an urban legend. They have an architectural license, just like several other companies making custom Arm CPUs do.
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21. brokencode ◴[26 Aug 25 21:42 UTC] No.45032667{8}[source]▶
Yeah, why would ARM prevent other companies from paying more for the better license?

All they care about is that companies buy an ARM license, not that they use the boilerplate ARM CPU design.

Those designs are there to make it easier for companies to make ARM-based chips who would otherwise never be able to design their own.

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22. ljosifov ◴[26 Aug 25 22:17 UTC] No.45033040[source]▶
Were they ARM investors at the time they needed CPU for Newton? Was that before or after e.g. iPaq PDA-s? And latter - was it that it looked that Apple maybe in danger of going under, and then they sold their ARM stake and got a cash injection that way?

I remember iPaq PDA fondly. Wrote a demo to select a song from a playlist with few thousand author-album-song with voice query. The WiFi add-on was a big plastic "sleeve", that the iPaq slid into, not the other way around. Could run the ASR engine for about whole 10 mins before it drained the battery flat, haha. :-)

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23. giantrobot ◴[26 Aug 25 23:24 UTC] No.45033574{3}[source]▶
IIRC Apple originally invested in ARM during the development of the Newton. The original Newtons used ARM 610 CPUs. I don't know exactly when they sold their ARM stake but they kept their architecture license.

The Newton was long before the iPaq, the MessagePad was released in 1993.

replies(1): >>45043193 #
24. kalleboo ◴[27 Aug 25 02:47 UTC] No.45034924{9}[source]▶
Then why are they so shy about granting Qualcomm a license?
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25. brokencode ◴[27 Aug 25 06:28 UTC] No.45036082{10}[source]▶
Qualcomm has a lot of money and Arm wants it. They’re not shy, but greedy.
26. ljosifov ◴[27 Aug 25 18:27 UTC] No.45043193{4}[source]▶
On selling of the ARM stake - asked ChatGPT:

Q> And latter - was it that it looked that Apple maybe in danger of going under, and then they sold their ARM stake and got a cash injection that way?

A> And yes. In the late-1990s turnaround, Apple sold down its ARM stake in multiple tranches after ARM’s 1998 IPO, realizing hundreds of millions of dollars that helped shore up finances (alongside the well-known $150 million Microsoft deal in Aug 1997).

27. skeezyboy ◴[28 Aug 25 14:06 UTC] No.45052338{4}[source]▶
so they didnt design all the components and sensors then