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447 points stephenheron | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.24s | 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. simne ◴[] No.45044460[source]
Read history of Bugatti Veyron for answer. In short, VW have made extraordinary machine, but so expensive, they fear to sell it for real cost.

So literally, VW partially donate Veyron to their clients, selling it under-priced.

I think, same happen with Apple M architecture - it is extraordinary and different from anything on market, but Apple sell it under-priced, so to limit losses, they decided to limit it to very few models.

How such things happen? Well, hardware is hard - usually so sophisticated SoC need 7..8 iterations to achieve production, and this could cost million or even more. And mostly happen problem, just low output, mean, for example you make 100 cores on one die, but only 5..6 working.

How AMD/Intel deal with such things? It's hard, mean complex.

First, they just have huge experience and very wide portfolio of different SoCs, but used some tricks, so could for example downgrade Xeon to Core-i7 with jumpers.

Second, for large patterns like RAM/Cache, could disable broken parts of die with jumpers, or even could disable cores. That's why there are so many DRAM PCB designs - they usually made as 6 RAM fields with one controller, and with jumpers could sell chips with literally 1, 2, 3,4,5 or 6 fields enabled; some AMD SoCs exists with odd number of cores because of this (for example 3-cores), and other tricks, which could made some averaged profits from wide line of SoCs.

Third, for some designs, Intel/AMD use already proven technologies, like Atom was basically just first Pentium on new semiconductor process, or for long time, I7 series was basically Xeons previous generations.

Unfortunately for Apple, they have not such luxury to make wide product line, and don't have significant place to dump low grade chips, so they limited M line to one which as I think just appear to have largest output.

From my experience, I could speculate, Apple tops consider to make wider product line, when achieve better output, but for now without much success.