Couple things that come to mind in response to that chart:
Its impressive, but:
Generally, take Intel's marketing material with a grain of salt. They're notorious for exaggerating, cherry-picking, and out-right lying in marketing materials.
Related to that: While both the M1 Max & 12900HK have on-board iGPUs, the M1 Max has an especially powerful GPU for its class; one of the best iGPUs ever produced. That's going to contribute massively to package power draw, which is what they're measuring on the X-axis; if the Xe G7 can't compete, then these graphs are disingenuous to the overall experience some customers would be looking for (alternatively, other customers will be going dGPU anyway, so it doesn't matter).
Related to that: Its unclear from the chart whether this is per-core relative perf or entire package and multithreaded perf. I'm guessing the latter, due to the size of that x-axis arc and because its roughly where we'd expect a 12th gen 14/20 configuration to land; that's an obscene amount of threads for mobile, far outpacing the 10/10 in M1 Max. In fact, I'd argue: if this is a multithread test, a 40% increase in cores w/ a 100% increase in SMT threads only arriving at a miniscule (~5%?) jump in perf at similar power draw is average, not good. The single-core perf, even on their high-draw cores under load, may be rather poor; so its end-of-day effectiveness may be very workload dependent.
Overall, I'm hopeful the real-world performance matches the expectations they've set, and I'm bullish on Intel's strategy. Chip manufacturing is hard, but TSMC is becoming a bottleneck for both Apple & AMD. Hyper-optimizing large processes may work out for them; but the proof will be in the pudding.
Power Chart with a Core-i9 11980HK (11th Generation) instead of a Core-i9 12900HK (12th Generation) discussed in the article. The chart is about half way down the page.
Most people I've seen use laptops near chargers, or at least within 2 hours of the nearest charging opportunity. Sometimes people travel and need more, but I don't think it's that common to need eight hours of charge at maximum performance.
Don't get me wrong, the M1 is an engineering marvel and as Apple's competitors move to a similar node size I hope they too will get these power usage benefits some way or another, but I don't think the average consumer needs all the features the M1 offers.
If Intel can come up with a laptop that's faster than the M1 at two thirds the price with the only downside being that you only get four hours of battery out of it with all cores clocked to their limit, then I don't see why most people who need the horsepower would pay extra for the M1, especially with its restrictions on what operating systems it can run comfortably. The impressive efficiency of the M1 simply isn't that pressing a matter for most people.
I hope Intel is right, and I hope they beat Apple. We've seen AMD overtake Intel and then saw their innovations slow to a crawl while they were ahead. Apple might end up doing the very same if there is no competition in this space. If Intel, AMD or Qualcom produce a chip even better than the M1, we can all only stand to gain from this.
This feels like a cope tbh. People work around poor battery life because that's the only option until recently. I used to feel similarly but since I got my M1 macbook, there have been several times where the excellent battery life have been great.
Recently I was at an airport a few hours before my flight and I ended up just playing games on a food court table. No need to huddle around one of the few seats with power points. Also great to pick up and move to a different room if the current one is noisy without needing to grab your charger as well.
And even in the office, sometimes there will be a multi hour session in a meeting room which is enough to drain everyone's intel macbooks flat.
Most people you've seen use laptops near chargers, or at least within 2 hours of the nearest charging opportunity, because their battery life sucks. I used to do that, but with my new M1 Laptop I can finally move freely and even afford to leave the house without even taking a charger with me, which feels great.
Heat seems just as big an issue as battery life, if not bigger. Can i9-12900HK-equipped laptops really exist in the same highly convenient size/weight bracket as the new MBPs and make use of all that power without extreme fan noise, extreme chassis heat, and/or extreme thermal throttling? My past experience with Intel mobile CPUs says no, absolutely not.
Honestly, my past experience with Intel mobile CPUs versus my current experience with my new MBP says I will never buy one of the former again, ever, unless it's otherwise a truly special machine or I have no choice.
I will admit that I'm not really the target market for the big, chunky laptops that can make a 75W+ TDP anything but miserable, because I have a desktop machine that still wipes the floor with anything in that segment. The truth about the M1 Pro/Max SoCs is that they won't give you the absolute hottest performance around in CPU or GPU, but they will give you legitimately great performance along with other attributes that are best-in-class taken together, mainly size, weight, battery endurance, and thermals. And those things do matter to a lot of people.
I am always within 1 minutes of a charger. My i9 MacBook still dies on me all the time. Get to 5% and go to the bathroom? Oops, it died, and I can’t join my next meeting on time.
Start a call at 10% battery? Will definitely have to interrupt to go plug in.
If you're letting it get to 5% when you're within 1 minute of a charger I don't think a more efficient CPU is gonna help you, you're just gonna end up leaving it off the charger for longer and still find yourself in same exact situations, just postponed a couple extra hours or so than they would've happened.
I like my work M1 macbook air, but when battery gets below 10% it seems to get very unhappy... Requires sitting on the charger for a while before it will even start up properly
Battery charge is really an estimate, not an absolute measurement. It is based on , among other things, the drop in voltage as the battery charge gets low. If your battery management system is a little off in calibration, that 10% could be closer to 5%.
I may be wrong, but I suspect this is because macOS fibs at/about low power to accommodate hibernation. (I see similar behavior on my intel MBP, so I doubt it’s platform specific.)
Case in point: about 12 minutes ago my laptop informed me the battery is low. It was at 10%. It's now at 9% so I will probably still get over 1h with it.
Edit: I went a total of 64 minutes after hitting 10%. Unfortunately the whole OS crashed at that point. I have been having issues with running 2 network extensions simultaneously, and I have a feeling the crash was more related to that than to running out of battery.
It took 10s after I plugged it into the mains for it to respond to the power button. Had this been a regular hibernate instead of a crash, I would have expected to be back at a fully usable desktop in less than 30s total. Unfortunately it took about 1 minute to fully boot and reopen all apps, which all things considered is not bad at all.
Heat & Fans matter too. 99% of my usage of my M1 macbook is in clam-shell mode, so I don't care about the battery life. But I do love that it doesn't dissipate much heat and that I never hear it.
I wouldn't necessarily bet on that. RRP for the chip they're talking about is $635; it's the top end. M1 Pro machines (the Max is a red herring; the cheaper Pros have the same CPU performance) start at $2k. Generally, laptops containing Intel's most expensive mobile chips cost more than that.
Like, it's probably in principle possible to produce a laptop containing the offending chip for $1320, but I doubt you'll see many of them.
Power use also has implications for the thermal envelope. Most laptops using Intel's current top-end chips can't sustain the top-end performance for long at all; they need to throttle to avoid melting.
If Intel can come up with a laptop that's faster than the M1 at two thirds the price with the only downside being that you only get four hours of battery out of it with all cores clocked to their limit
I don't see how Intel can come up with a macbook air equivalent at a price of $350.
I thought that my fan never turned on. I was curious so I installed a fan meter (https://github.com/exelban/stats). If I'm playing a game and running a windows VM, it does sometimes turn on around 2,000 RPMs. I can't hear it even if I put my ear up to the vents.
So, it doesn't seem to turn on almost ever for me. I've had it for over a month and I've never heard it turn on. I've seen it turn on (via the menu-bar monitor) and tried to listen for the fan and just can't hear anything. I'll be using it with the vents covered by a blanket and it doesn't seem to notice.
It's one of the reasons that I love this machine. My 2020 Intel MacBook Pro would run those fans all the time making lots of noise. A web page would randomly start using a lot of CPU and my battery would drain, things would slow down, and the fans would sing their song. The magic of my new M1 Pro machine is that nothing seems to phase it. It's not like I had a crappy old laptop for comparison. I had a 2.4GHz Intel MacBook Pro that was over $2,000.
I was wondering if the fan would go on and it might go on more if you're doing a lot of high-end rendering, but it doesn't for my usage. IntelliJ, Windows VMs, whatever, it mostly stays off and sometimes turns on, but low enough that I can't hear it even with my ear to the vents. It feels magical.
I have had the 14” since October and I have never heard the fan. For example, I have two 4K external displays at home and the fan on my i9 MBP was almost always on when the displays were connected (especially when using video conferencing). Not so with the 14”. Love this machine, better in every way.
I have the 14 pro and it is spookily quiet. Even when being at full load. Though perhaps after many years of dust accumulation this may change over the air.
However I watched some tests of the M1 max on YouTube and it does seems like this one can get noisy
I have the 16" which has slightly better thermals. When it's in clamshell mode and I'm doing heavy stuff (maybe a zoom call + big compilation + running a few local services) I can feel a tiny bit of warm air coming out. Can't hear anything though.
I have an i7 16" intel and maxing out a single core will spin up the fans in short order. Maxing out multiple cores is kind of absurd how much noise and throttling happens
I have the 2020 pro and I have only heard the fan once and that was when a compile bugged out and got stuck. Otherwise I don’t even hear the fan while gaming.
1. This is a slide from Intel. And they dont mention what sort of performance. Edit [1]
2. This is from witeken. A Well known Intel "supporter".
AlderLake is good, but claiming it offer more Pref / Watt than Apple's M1 Max on a node that is generation behind would require some independent testing to verify . Because all the data known so far doesn't seems to suggest this. Especially in the case of Single Core Performance.
[1] The metric used is the geometric mean of an "n-copy" SPECrate run of the C/C++ integer benchmarks in SPEC CPU 2017. You can find the M1 SPECrate 2017 results here
To be fair, comparing TSMC’s nodes vs Intel’s isn’t exactly fair for CPUs since Intel has always had performance advantages beyond density such as Ion, cobalt, air gaps, etc.
If I'm reading this right, it's saying that when M1 Max is at peak performance (at 35W), the I9-12900HK is beating this performance while at the same wattage.
They're specifically talking about the mobile part here.
But it's not hard to believe that it will outrun the M1 Max in multithreaded benchmarks, and likely even single-threaded benchmarks. Intel's latest desktop parts are already faster than an M1 Max by a not-insignificant amount, and this is just a lower-power version. Intel's Alder Lake desktop parts are already surprisingly power efficient (ignoring the heavily clocked i9-12900K flagship, which was designed to basically ignore power consumption)
The real wildcard is where the power consumption comes in. Intel has some slides showing it being competitive with or even surpassing the M1 Max. I know a lot a lot of people will scoff at such a claim, but I don't actually have a hard time believing it.
I think the M1 is still going to win when it comes to idle consumption, though. I'm going to guess that net battery life is still going to favor the M1 by a decent margin, at least for mixed workloads where the CPU is idle a lot.
Yeah; with all these comparisons, many people in the HN bubble forget how much work (and play) still happens on desktops (not to mention in servers). Power efficiency matters, but raw power still matters too.
The 12900k (desktop) pushes an obscene 8p+8e 16c/24t design. Compare this to M1 Max's 8p+2e 10c/10t. M1's per-core perf lead, if it even exists, won't overcome that.
And yeah, its an obscene miss if one overlooks that the 12900k can draw 250 watts, versus M1 Max's ~50w (?). But Apple sells desktops too; they're loved by the Pros Apple spent years neglecting.
There are rumors that Apple is prepping a "M1 Duo" or "M1 Quad" variant of M1 Max for an upcoming Mac Pro. But the wild part is two-fold: First, a "Duo" variant (16p+4e 20c/20t) still may not match the 12900k, and while a "Quad" variant would surpass it (32p+8e 40c/40t), we'd be talking about 12900k levels of power draw anyway. And arguably a chip like that shouldn't be compared to i9; it should be compared to the Xeons its replacing in the Mac Pro.
Apple's M1 is an obscene chip; but I'm fearful of expectations going forward. Pros were exuberant when it was announced, because it was an indication that Apple has started Caring about them after over a decade of being neglected. But if Apple continues the pattern they started with M1 by waiting a year or more to sieve the iPhone core architecture each year all the way down to a proper high-end part, its not obvious to me that pros are better off. The issues Pros were facing on Apple hardware, up to this point, were really Intel's fault (and Apple's ability to integrate Intel's chips in an effective manner); but AMD forced Intel into high gear, and now to some degree, for pros, it feels like we're re-living the same story again. Apple in-housing their chips does not fix their perpetual de-prioritization of pro workloads; if anything it exasperates it, because now we're at the bottom of the totem pole for Apple's chip production monopoly each year, rather than at least hoping Intel could service us.
I'm glad power efficiency is really getting a spotlight recently I tested a new AMD build with a ryzen 5 and a few hard drives and it was drawing 70w idle with a headless linux distro running. Some of this can be blamed on the case fans and hard drives, but even without that it doesn't come anywhere close to what a mac mini would draw.
I have an M1, M1 Pro, and Core i7-12700K on my desk. The Intel part is the fastest on single and multi-threaded workloads I care about, and it does not come with the rosetta nonsense that makes it difficult to manage your compilers and libs on macOS. It does come with a different kind of nonsense, namely that Linux doesn't know what to do with the efficiency cores of the Intel part, so you have to either disable them or manually manage process and IRQ placement. Oh, and I can put however much memory and SSDs into the PC as I can afford, unlike the Macs.
Currently using the M1 mini as a display head with VSCode connected to the PC over Thunderbolt, as a backend. Seems like the best of worlds. M1 Pro is probably going to get sold.
The M1 is probably the first time a lot of people have had to deal with cross compiling so the tooling kind of sucks right now but I imagine in a few years it will be seamless.
There's been a heck of a lot of friction though. It turns out that there are lots of open source builds that believe darwin but not x86 implies powerpc, and there are lots of python programs that believe they are entitled to build and install .so libraries, overwriting one arch with the other. Also fortran continues to be a mess.
Right, it is actually possible Intel found the one set of multi-threaded tests where they can lower the voltage/frequency to match the M1 Pro/Max power consumption and just edge ahead on performance due to sheer thread count. Apple decided their high-end laptop needed x number of cores, Intel can always grab a desktop part with x+n cores, shove it into a laptop, and claim a victory.
Makes for a good marketing slide. Does not say a whole lot about the whole package, or every other workload besides this one that laptops might run. Say for example, single thread power efficiency, or anything that needs a GPU and won't drain the battery in 30 minutes.
I agree, it's definitely not unbelievable that Intel can beat Apple under load. Especially as many workloads will be optimised for x86 (for now). Idle definitely seems to be Intel's Achilles heel, although I guess the e-cores will help once good OS support is there as Intel mobile chips seem to be pretty decent at saving power once they go into the lower c-states.
I think a lot of the Apple efficiency gains also come from the all-in SoC design (i.e. memory etc. all in the same chip). I guess Intel is trying to make the same play here but I'm sceptical they'll have as much success in the near term simply because they're reliant on OEMs to pretty much redesign their products around that so it could be several years before all the manufacturers cycle their product lines around. Not to mention many PC fans _like_ the fact they can upgrade the RAM in their laptops SODIMM slots.
“Intel announces the 12th Gen Intel® Core™ family of mobile processors led by the launch of new H-series mobile processors featuring the flagship Intel® Core™ i9-12900HK – the fastest mobile processor ever [1]“
“[1] Based on superior performance of 12th Gen Intel Core i9 12900HK against Intel Core i9 11980HK, AMD Ryzen 9 5900HX, and Apple M1 Max. Intel processor performance is estimated based on measurements with Intel Reference Validation Platforms. AMD processor performance is estimated based on measurements on a Lenovo Legion R9000K with RTX 3080. Apple M1 Max performance is estimated based on public statement made by Apple on 10/18/2021 and measurements on Apple M1 Max 16” 64GB RAM Model A2485. Best available compilers selected for all processors. Binaries compiled with ICC for Intel/AMD, binaries compiled with Xcode 13.1 for Apple. The metric used is the geometric mean of an n-copy SPECrate run of the C/C++ integer benchmarks in SPEC CPU 2017. See www.intel.com/PerformanceIndex for additional workload and configuration details. Results may vary. Other names and brands may be claimed as the property of others.”
I wonder if the xcode binaries are compiled for Arm or x86_64 via Rosetta emulation - and how much difference that makes to performance and efficiency?
Maybe you're thinking of FJCVTZS, which is intended to accelerate a common operation in JavaScript engines? That's not unique to M1, though; rather added to a relatively recent ARM ISA revision. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25422168
I think there may be other optimizations related to Apple's reference counting and type tagging models for Objective-C and Swift.
True, but it’s not impossible to design a processor that is much faster at running high level code in certain languages a lot faster than another processor that is roughly equivalent at running low level code.
Apart from what others already said (performance per watt) this PR fails to acknowledge that M1 also has a built-in Neural Engine cores for accelerating machine learning, which is going to become the main feature of many apps.
Indeed, M1 is unique in the respect that you get CPU, GPU and ML cores in a single chip, with incredible performance and minimal power utilization.
I understand the performance and power pros, but I don't like Apple architecture, if one of CPU, GPU or ML fails you have to replace everything, even what's still working.
In fact I'm all in with Framework laptop, sadly they don't ship in Europe.
Apple has already won. Even if Intel catches up in efficiency, it doesn't matter. Even if they're 30% faster, it doesn't matter. Apple is in charge of their own destiny with Apple Silicon. That's invaluable.
I think he's saying that Apple processors are best for Apple. It's no longer beholden to outsiders for its processors. There is value in freedom that, for Apple, is greater than mere numbers can convey.
I think it depends on one's definition of "better". There will likely always be performance-at-any-cost choices that will beat Apple since that's not what they're solving for.
Said like that it sounds ridiculous. That being said, if Apple silicon has the same rate of improvement as iPhone processors, Intel's victory is very temporary.
Apple A SoCs were catching up Intel CPU's performance and finally caught up at around A12-A13. I don't expect they can improve it forever at same rate.
It doesn’t make sense though because having your own architecture isn’t that useful if no one else wants to use it. The goal is to 10X your profits by licensing out your designs. Designing your own architecture is a 1X move if only you use it and that’s not counting the cost of maintenance and marketing.
Counterpoint: Apple has sunk an incredible amount of money into an architecture that provides very few tangible benefits to the consumer. It looks unlikely that they’ll ever recoup costs. They could have put that money toward their own fab and received infinite US government money instead.
What you are saying is antithetical to the entire Apple strategy, which is to create the best vertically integrated hardware and software and charge a premium for it. The strategy you're suggesting is to commoditize yourself, which they already tried (do you remember the Mac clone era), and is also the same reason IBM lost the PC market to Microsoft and none of the resulting hardware OEMs have even a fraction of Apple's market cap.
Also, to suggest that Apple Silicon has very few tangible benefits is laughable. The power / performance are incredible, and the deep integration provides tons of optimizations that no other manufacturer can match. This ranges from seemingly simple things like M1 Macs waking up faster than you can open the lid, to long-term strategic advantages such as cross-compiling single binaries to both Mac OS and iOS, or adding custom silicon to cover software features with unprecedented efficiency with a guarantee that every single machine running it will have access to that hardware (over time).
Every time they zig or zag on the architecture, though, it presents a risk to their third-party ecosystem. Yeah, there will be a few years where a backwards-compatibility penalty box is offered, but eventually someone's x86-64 only tools or extensions will break.
They also threw out the ability to say "If your company/tasks don't work with MacOS, you can always dual-boot full-fat Windows."
They have to be betting that their platform is still big and compelling enough to keep bringing in users and developers to replace anything they lose to the x86-64 abandonment.
I tend to think that there's no real magic secret to ARM for low power, it's more that we've spent the last 20 years optimizing them for low-power devices while x86 was traditionally performance-at-all-cost.
That’s correct, but (a) the recipe is extremely non-trivial and (b) Apple could take that recipe to Samsung and get mostly comparable results for something in the double-digit millions of dollars range for design conversion, so they have leverage.
Right - show me an ambiently-cooled Intel laptop with the same performance as a MacBook Air M1, available for purchase in the market, metric-for-metric. It doesn’t exist.
I have an i9-12900K (same gen desktop chip) that is self-reporting ~15W idle. I would be pretty surprised if their mobile chip didn't scale lower than that.
It's impossible to overstate the quality of life difference this makes. I've had an M1 Pro MBP since launch and I'm still yet to hear the fans come on. I stress tested it by generating a 5 minute music video (fairly complex Magic project) while also building a multi-arch docker image - laptop remained totally cool and silent, and the video rendered in 6 minutes. The same video on my top of the range, maxed out Intel MBP took over 20 minutes to render, got so hot I couldn't touch the bottom of the laptop and sounded like a 747 taking off. And I wasn't simultaneously building a docker image.
This feels like Intel blowing smoke. Comparing an HK processor to the M1 Pro/Max feels disingenuous.
AnandTech compared the 11th generation HK to the M1 Max and found the M1 Max to use a lot less power (https://www.anandtech.com/show/17024/apple-m1-max-performanc...). The HK used 2.7x, 2.1x, 2.3x, 2.0x, 3.2x, 1.9x, 1.3x, 1.3x, and then the gaming ones with discrete GPU where the combo used 3.2x and 2.4x. The MSI laptop with that HK chip in it is a 6.4 pound laptop with a 280W charger.
What's so great about my M1 Pro MacBook is that I never hear fan noise. It doesn't get warm. I don't have to worry about running my battery down with IntelliJ. I don't have to worry about covering the vents with a blanket. I just get to use it.
Intel is also announcing new 28W P-series processors and 9-15W U-series processors. The M1 (non-Pro/Max) fits into a fan-less MacBook Air. While my MacBook Pro has a fan, it basically never comes on (which definitely wasn't the case with my 10th generation Intel MacBook Pro). Comparing a 45W HK part to an M1 Pro/Max that seems to be well below 28W just doesn't seem like a real comparison.
We'll see when AnandTech and others get their hands on it, but if it's achieving marginal performance gains while using double the power, that's not impressive.
It kinda leaves me with the question: Are the HK processors a desperate attempt for Intel to get positive PR? When Apple showed off the M1 Max, it was showing off a chip that would fit in a gorgeous, convenient laptop. All of a sudden, you could have all that power without compromise. The HK processors feel like Intel saying, "see, you can have that power with us too," except that it doesn't come without the compromises. It comes with a 280W power adapter, a large and heavy form factor, heat, and low battery life. Or maybe Intel has pulled it off...but it seems like a desperate attempt to say "we're #1...if you don't look closely."
Maybe Intel has pulled off something amazing. It seems more likely that they've produced a low-volume 45W part that will let them claim a benchmark crown while their 28W, 15W, and 9W parts are still behind. The fact that they're trumpeting a 45W part immediately makes me think that they're making a bad faith comparison.
I hope Intel does well because competition is good for me as a consumer. This comparison doesn't make me think Intel has caught Apple.
Well Intel is also claiming lower energy usage at equivalent performance (see other posts in this thread). I take that with a grain of salt, but that's the claim. If true then you could power-limit it and use less energy to do the same work as the M1 (although it's not clear even from Intel's marketing that theirs scales down quite so well as M1 so as a general purpose low power / low heat / long battery life laptop that you don't run flat out all the time it's possible it would still be better overall even if Intel's claims hold up).
I really want to know how much power a typical 12th-gen Intel i9 laptop will require, with a number of web pages open in Windows, Windows Terminal with an Ubuntu shell open, just sitting there as I read HN.
Which is to say, mostly idle.
Next level, let's say you also have Dropbox installed and mostly up to date, not obviously indexing or whatever.
I'm getting some strange numbers from my MacBook Air M1, like 25 milliWatts of SoC power draw. 0.025 Watts. That doesn't include the display (5 Watts?) etc.
Windows Performance Monitor would show me a battery discharge of about 7 Watts on my little HP Stream 11, under roughly these conditions.
Such low end might not seem relevant to you, but it covers most of my usage. VS Code, web pages, files.
I try to keep the M1 MacBook Air away from direct contact with my skin, because my body, at ~ 36 C, is hotter than its idle operating temperature.
My old Ivy Bridge laptops can't tie their shoes at anything under 50 degrees C.
Wow. Intel has shifted from being a leader to a follower.
It doesn't matter if this particular chip is better than that particular chip.
Apple will come up with an M2 or M2X that will be better or faster or cheaper.
Apple is focusing on its products. Make then quieter, make them faster, make them last longer, make them lighter. The M1 design goals would be tuned to that.
Seems like Intels goals are tuned to whatever beats M1.
> Intel claims that an 11th gen Core i7-1185G7 CPU can match or exceed the MacBook Pro M1’s processor in both native and non-native applications based on the benchmarks released. The company also says the 11th gen Core I7 will provide better battery life.
So can we assume the leap of M1 -> M1 Max is bigger than 11th i7 -> 12th i7, therefore Intel can only beat it with i9?
But it is a little strange since M1 Max has more CPU, GPU core and memory, and CPU design is almost the same. while Intel 12th core is a new design.
It's ironic how Intel is now the company that needs to try to punch up in marketing after putting a sales/marketing person in charge for several years and falling straight down the ladder to pretty much last place.
x86 has its roots in the PC, which was an open and relatively standardised platform.
ARM's rise to popularity came later, and there are literally thousands if not tens of thousands of different SoCs with an ARM core, which have nothing in common but the core. All the locked-down mobile devices are in this category, and their SoC manufacturers have been extremely reluctant to release much in the way of documentation.
> x86 has its roots in the PC, which was an open and relatively standardised platform.
x86 was and is proprietary (ARM's ISAs and designs are as well). The wider x86 platform is somewhat standardized, but that doesn't mean it's open any more than Apple computers using Thunderbolt or PCI or USB or DDR standards mean they are open.
This is starting to seem trollish. If you are incapable of addressing the original comment I wrote about x86's proprietary nature then these rhetorical questions don't add anything. If you are, then please let's hear it (not in the form of a vague rhetorical question but a coherent argument). That said I'll humor you once more.
> Do they sell ARM processors and motherboards?
Yes some of those boards are essentially motherboards with ARM processors on them.
> Are there even standard sockets for them?
Not that I know of for ARM chips. If by "standard" you mean Intel-proprietary or AMD-proprietary, then there is be no reason that an ARM vendor or ARM Ltd. itself could not define a socket specification. That's not a matter of openness or proprietariness of the platform.
x86-64 is patented (and the earliest CPUs with it are now over 20 years old, so probably expiring soon if not already), but original 32-bit x86 is long out of patent and there are/were quite a few other manufacturers.
Even though the facility testing the new Intel CPU was submerged kilometres underwater, the blinding flash and mushroom cloud from the core meltdown was visible from orbit. In an instant hundreds of cubic kilometres of ocean boiled off. In the hours and days that followed, the mega tsunamis and earthquakes reduced most cities to scrambled ruins, the lands poisoned with radioactive salt rain.
Yeah right after all their bullshit perf metric shenanigans there’s no way I’m going to believe it on face value. How much longer have they been doing this than Crapple, and they think this is something to brag about? It’s 2004 all over again.
Edit: @deepnotderp[1] found the power adjusted basis: https://mobile.twitter.com/witeken/status/147844103741682893...
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29802359#29803502