I'm genuinely very interested to see how power efficiency compares to M4 and X4. X4 could already pull >10W single core in many workloads, and I'm pretty sure M4 can as well with how it looks like some ST tests benefit from wild cooling setups in the iPad. So I'm mostly interested to see if X5 will push even higher, or will it manage the significant performance uptick at the same or lower power.
Agreed.
X5’s average though in Specint and SpecFP was still not 10W. It was like 5.7 and 7 where Apple’s were also as high just with much performance. So yeah while that’s true, I could quote outliers in individual loads for AMD and Intel as well and it’d be fairly unpretty, they’re still ahead of what Phoenix etc would pull down (and remember those workloads measured full power including DRAM etc).
But I agree about the direction it and Apple has gone even if still more efficient than AMD/Intel from a system perspective — though they (Apple especially) get very upset about this because they believe their “core” really only consumes 4-5W for the whole machine lol. It’s hilarious and reminiscent of like, the other guys quoting package or core power. Everyone is completely full of it and it’s so tiresome.
Indeed RE: X5. They have as much IPC as the A14 almost, yet they’re pulling down much more power even on superior nodes. I’ve said this elsewhere, but Arm will need more than just improved IPC — they’ll need a better architecture RE: power, and more cache.
Did you see the M4 iPad GB6 test from a Chinese reviewer? Not the fake 7W BS, the 11W one, which makes far more sense to me, and was measured externally.
Except this is averaged over the entire load, and more telling. The performance of course is good, but the direction they’re going is clearly pushing power up more than nodes can afford.