Can Intel finally beat ARM on performance per Watt?

154 pointsposted 9 hours ago
by gumby
(hackaday.com)

85 Comments

3eb7988a1663

4 hours ago

  > no headphone jack
I am fully old man screaming at the clouds here, but what does this cost for Dell to include? I insist on a wired headset - telecommunications already barely works, I don't want to add wireless+battery problems into the mix.

LexGray

an hour ago

I want to say I’ve broken every headphone jack I ever had. Yanking on them, debris getting in the switch, debris triggering the optical if it had one. 3.5 was never a great design. Too many physical ways for it to break, from static from a loose connection, debris stuck inside like pebbles getting jammed, debris stuck under the switch preventing recognition. False positive or accidental triggers that take a while to track down why the speakers are muted.

Of all the parts on electronics I have owned i would put headphone jack just behind power supply for least reliable and that it was set to override digital settings when something was connected felt like a loss of control.

I am very forgetful, wireless has been a godsend by comparison and I don’t get hurt with cable snags. I’d pay extra to remove it before shipping if it were an option.

galangalalgol

an hour ago

I have aeen usb-c bent but I have never seen 3.5 break in decades of use. Walkmans then discmans falling. Shooting back out of my chair and snagging it such that the whole tower spins unplugging ps/2 mouse. But the headphones are fine. What do you do to those poor things? The only time I have seen one fail it was on a custom pcb and the solder joint broke. A couple minutes with an iron and it was back.

bobmcnamara

3 minutes ago

Some terrible jacks are held on by the contacts.

pseudosavant

3 hours ago

Agreed, losing the headphone jack on something the size of a phone was already questionable space saving for a bigger battery. But on something the size of a laptop, it is a joke. I'm sure it has more to do with saving $1 per laptop than any user benefit.

prmoustache

2 hours ago

no jack doesn't mean wireless only. Not having TRRS 3.5mm is a bit annoying but there are lots of usb-a or usb-c headset that have an embedded DAC + you can always use the DAC/USB soundcard of your choice. Also many laptops only had TRS which really killed the appeal of having analog wired equipment if you were forced to use the embedded laptop microphone.

geerlingguy

2 hours ago

With only two USB-C ports that means you get just headphones and power if you're not using a hub or USB dock.

15155

3 hours ago

3.5mm TRS jacks might cost 10 cents to include and then hundreds of dollars to service when they break. The issue is not the BOM cost.

jackdoe

3 hours ago

> then hundreds of dollars to service when they break

Can you explain what do you mean by that? It is quite rare to see broken trrs jack on a laptop, at least I have never experienced one, nor on walkman or anything getting heavy plug/unplug use.

I thought it is an issue in reducing the cost to manufacture the case or something.

scarlehoff

2 hours ago

The jack actually broke on my old xps. Changing it with an aliexpress replacement took about 15 minutes and something like 3€

So yeah, they break, but they are (or used to be?) quite cheap to fix (and this was one of the super thin 13" xps)

Marsymars

2 hours ago

I’ve never had one break due to heavy use, but broke one on my work desktop due to forgetting I was wearing headphones and yanking on it when I got up.

3eb7988a1663

2 hours ago

Does anyone even do repairs anymore? Swap a motherboard and that's it.

j16sdiz

2 hours ago

So... swapping $100 component for a $0.3 break?

Doesn't this make including the jack even less justifiable?

guelo

2 hours ago

Or don't swap it and live without the jack. But I have never seen a broken 3.5mm port but I've seen many, many broken or flaky USB-C ports.

Groxx

3 hours ago

We've got laptops with modular USB-C ports that solve this effectively perfectly. An audio one would be even simpler. The only reason you don't see it everywhere is because they're being outrageously hostile to repairs, and choosing to charge you hundreds of dollars for repairs on a part that they know is easily broken.

jojobas

34 minutes ago

Since when is damage covered by warranty?

truncate

3 hours ago

I like a good old headphone jack, but then the USB DACs these days are also super small and portable that I just keep connected to my wired sets. I have couple nice IEMs, and because my phone doesn't have jack, I've to carry around USB DAC anyway.

noir_lord

3 hours ago

My (Razer Blackshark) gaming headset does that - the actual headset has a 3.5mm jack on it but the "guts" is a USB DAC with some THX stuff supposedly built in (questionable utility but most of the games I play don't support it anyway) - I figure they reuse the same headset components down the market and just don't ship the DAC, it works flawlessly under Windows/Linux so no real issues with it and I can use it with any other set of wired headphones (of similar impedance) which is nice since headsets wear out eventually but the DAC is solid state so should last much longer.

Sleaker

41 minutes ago

The dolby/thx stuff for headphone s is done at the software level. It's just preset filters provided by synapse. There is no hardware dolby unless you get into the PCI audio card stuff, or audiophile dedicated sound board setups. Different USB DAC might impact noise levels. If you don't have noticeable audio artifacts then there's not really any reason to use another one.

ciupicri

2 hours ago

Doesn't it use the CPU more because of the inefficiency of USB?

noir_lord

2 hours ago

Theoretically maybe (assuming it's not doing hardware offloading but I don't think that is all that common) but feeding a DAC with audio over USB isn't even a rounding error on one core and I have 16 of them (16C/32T) - iirc the actual DAC just takes PCM over USB 2.0 (Linux did tell me when I was curious), that's nothing to a modern desktop computer never mind a powerful gaming/development one.

Nothing for the desktop in the last couple of decades is going to struggle with that.

truncate

2 hours ago

I mainly use Apple one on MacBook, and haven't noticed any CPU or issues with that. I've another one which has more power, can't say I use it that much so no idea about CPU, but I think because of higher power draw may affect battery slightly (prob bigger issue on phones).

gertrunde

2 hours ago

There are USB headsets, that usually provides a few extra handy features, like volume/mute and call answer/hangup buttons.

Does it have to be wired via headphones jack?

throwaway173738

an hour ago

It does if it’s a pair of big studio monitors like what I wear for calls.

jojobas

32 minutes ago

These would have a 3.5 port themselves, ready for a usb-c-3.5 cable of questionable DAC quality.

gumby

2 hours ago

Surely a usb c headset would work

IshKebab

an hour ago

I think they probably just aren't used much any more. Plus if you really need one you can get a tiny dongle for virtually no money that will probably better sound quality anyway.

parl_match

2 hours ago

repair costs, more substantial than bom.

> I insist on a wired headset

usb audio generally works great, and because it's powered, you often get better audio quality (with microphone arrays for anc)

and even neat features like system volume integration with buttons and ANC

i have a yealink uh48 but you can get almost-as-good functionality for a lot less (or pay more for even better!)

dghlsakjg

4 hours ago

Many headphones can do audio over usb-c if you want a wired connection. If you want to use a fully analog set of cans, you can also just get a usb-c to 3.5mm adapter for a few bucks.

No need for wireless and battery, just not the plug you were expecting.

throwaway173738

an hour ago

If it’s anything like the lightning to 3.5mm adapters I’ll be buying one of those once a month for the rest of my life.

bhouston

6 hours ago

The improved efficiency is great!

The Apple Neo was still 2x faster for graphics and around 1.4x faster for single core cpu. And remember the Apple Neo is running an iPhone CPU that is much slower than the M series.

It is strange that this chip is so crazy efficient though. I would love to know the details of exactly why it is? It seems like some new tech or process?

I do want 1.5x battery life for free out of my next laptop. Who wouldn’t?

MBCook

6 hours ago

Apple has been working ruthlessly on battery efficiency for a long time because of the phones and their tendency to minimize battery sizes on Macs for thinness.

The exact design of the cores, how they’re scheduled, the way background stuff is handled on MacOS. All of it. The chips are made on a fantastic process too, but that alone isn’t it. For example they’ve been putting the ability to drop refresh rate really low when nothing changes to more and more of their machines.

It could be that the Intel chip is close, IDK.

But add in other motherboard components, the screen, the OS, the software and system libraries, all are optimized together to hit those numbers. And any of those alone or in combination could be part of the differences.

oofbey

6 hours ago

I think the Top500 benchmark is biased here. It’s a supercomputing benchmark which means it’s going to heavily weight SIMD and float64 performance, which are things that rarely matter for everyday computing. SIMD has uses in the real world - image or video editing, data crunching, graphics. But consumers basically never use fp64 any more, and so many modern chips have next to zero performance on them. That could easily skew the numbers in intel’s favor.

pclmulqdq

6 minutes ago

What? Pretty much every general-purpose calculation on your computer that isn’t an integer is done with FP64. AI may not use it and games may prefer FP32 for many things, but your CPU certainly does a ton of FP64 work.

Archit3ch

2 hours ago

> consumers basically never use fp64 any more

They do in audio processing. ;)

bobmcnamara

4 minutes ago

I usually use fp32 for the sole reason I can fit twice as many ~24 bit samples per register.

Danox

10 minutes ago

They have control over the OS and the design of the chip, Intel does not…

kzrdude

4 hours ago

Yes, it seems to be a new process, 18A. (18 Ångström, allegedly). Manufactured in North America. If the shiny video they did didn't fool me, it's a two sided wafer process, power grid on one side, then the silicon wafer (with through-silicon vias), then transistors, then signal layers.

The processor is this one: Intel Core 5 processor 320 https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/sku/246018/... in the Wildcat Lake series.

re-thc

6 hours ago

> And remember the Apple Neo is running an iPhone CPU that is much slower than the M series.

We really need to get over generalization like "phone CPU". Times have changed. Phone or not really isn't the focus.

Per core the A series (cough phone) isn't that much slower than equivalent M series. It's literally the same family just with some extra features, more power, etc.

MBCook

6 hours ago

I suspect that the comment is more about this not being Apple’s best standard consumer CPU for computers, which would be the M5 (though to your point that’s also in iPads).

It’s good Intel can match anything while staying cool and efficient. That’s a great step. But I’d like to see them match the M5.

dghlsakjg

4 hours ago

Phone is a sort of short hand for what tradeoffs are likely in the chip. A phone processor is going to prioritize efficiency and thermals over raw performance. Mobile will strike a different balance. While desktop likely prioritizes raw power over performance per watt, thermals be damned!

pseudosavant

3 hours ago

Of course, that same "phone" processor gets to operate with battery and thermal headroom of a laptop in the Macbook Neo. The bigger trade-offs are due to the device the chip operates within.

LoganDark

4 hours ago

Phones have markedly different thermal limits compared to desktop or even laptops. A laptop CPU can easily suck 30W or more while a phone might not ever reach 10W.

dimask

an hour ago

Nice and organised work!

My only reservation wrt the core of it is that it tests the cpus on a matrix operations task, and power efficiency in this case refers specifically to doing matrix operations. This is fine if that's the kind of task one wants to optimise for, but it does not necessarily translate to general energy efficiency for a broader spectrum of tasks that most people may do most of the time.

And thus, if one wants to optimise for matrix operations, wouldn't it make sense to use apple's accelerate framework instead of blis/openblas (I think you used blis?)? I compiled hpl to use accelerate [0] on my m1 max (macbook), and ran it with settings almost identical to the original m1 max settings [1]. I get 422 Gflops vs 264 Gflops in m1 max mac studio (docker) [2]. My average draw (using a wall power meter, but not interfaced with computer to keep a log, just me looking at it) is around 55-57W (probably less because it peaked at 57W but the last half was getting around 52W). With the most conservative estimate of 57W, this gave a 7.4 Gflops/W which is second place, just below the m4 mac mini in the benchmark table. The m1 max in the original did 4 Gflops/W (at 66W).

So tbh I do not really trust the conclusion of the benchmark page, except if I miss sth. It is quite nice, organised work anyway.

[0] https://github.com/tycho/hpl/blob/master/setup/Make.MacOSX_A...

[1] I just fixed the p:q ratio, which was prob not really meant to be 1:10 there, I assume, also judging from the settings in the other tests. I put p=2,q=4. Also I was unable to put more than 8 processes in total.

[2] The original m1 max benchmark: https://github.com/geerlingguy/top500-benchmark/issues/4

geerlingguy

a minute ago

Can you please post an issue on the repo? Long on my todo list has been trying to get the Mac tests more repeatable/consistent and optimized (always easier on Linux).

bearjaws

an hour ago

Depends on whether the OS actually puts the laptop or sleep or not.

lern_too_spel

2 hours ago

This field (XPS 13 and Neo) includes the Chromebook Plus Spin 514 with Mediatek Kompanio Ultra inside, which is superior to both in performance and hardware (and default OS, IMHO) and sells for $100 less.

miladyincontrol

5 hours ago

Intel wins, in HPL FP64. Its a stretch to take a single metric and apply it's outcome broadly to the chip's general functionality. Especially when by large the A18 chip with half the power requirement beats it in almost every other benchmark.

slashdave

4 hours ago

M4's GPU does not support 64 float. So, yeah. No hardware support, so what are you expecting? The fact that it comes close is pretty impressive.

geerlingguy

4 hours ago

These tests were done on the CPU cores, not on the GPU. In every test I ran the A18 chip blew past Intel's Core 5 on GPU performance.

There were a series of other benchmarks too, but the Hackaday article only highlights HPL as that was the benchmark that changed my perspective on Intel a bit. This was the first X86 chip to trade blows in efficiency (and idle power draw) with Apple's M3/M4 (I don't have any M5 to test with right now).

KingMachiavelli

4 hours ago

A more accurate title is can Intel (Linux/Windows) beat Apple?

If you don't want to run Windows, is there even a choice? My issue now with the non-Apple computers if you want to run Linux it's really hard to predict how awful Chromium/Firefox will be. My work Dell Laptop is only a 3 year old CPU with integrated GPU (and unused Nvidia GPU) but Chromium and Firefox are both slow as shit just loading pages like Slack and Outlook. Even resizing the browser windows seems 4-5x times slower than my M3 Macbook Air.

Maybe this is strictly a Linux issue but it hardly matters when the Windows ecosystem is pretty stagnant, full of junk-ware, and software development is much, much better on Linux/MacOS.

hnuser123456

4 hours ago

You might want to try getting the Nvidia GPU working. They're several times faster than intel integrated, and browsers are a GPU-heavy application.

Intel keeps trying to say their integrated graphics are finally decently fast, but that's only a select few special models. Their high-volume chips continue to have integrated GPUs that are barely fast enough for web browsing.

wyan

2 hours ago

How are laptop GPUs these days in terms of energy consumption? My last experience was a while ago, but the battery drained fast with them active.

geerlingguy

an hour ago

They still eat battery, but at least the midrange ones, not nearly as much as they used to.

jgalt212

4 hours ago

My servers run linux, my customers run windows, but if I run Mac that only adds to my complexity. So all our dev boxes run Linux.

spockz

4 hours ago

I’m running CachyOS (based on arch) and it is blazing fast. Both with Firefox and Vivaldi. Especially compared to the windows install I used to have on the same machine. Or is your point only about windows?

KingMachiavelli

3 hours ago

Hmm, I'm using the CachyOS kernel but on NixOS. What CPU/GPU are you using?

I tried using the flatpak Chromium in case it was some NixOS build optimization oddities but didn't see much of a difference.

ethin

4 hours ago

This is interesting but what I would love to see is Mac M4/M5 performance (speed) on an Intel laptop CPU. I know that it will be really difficult to pull off (assuming it's achievable at all) given that Intel just makes the CPU and the computer manufacturers for PCs don't do the kind of tuning that Apple is able to do, but still, I can't help but hope that maybe it can be done somehow. Maybe even while making the machines still serviceable! (Yes yes, I know, but a man can dream...)

aryonoco

an hour ago

Intel’s low end SoCs are such an undervalued gem.

A couple of years ago I got tired of dealing with OpenWRT and various Tomato based firmware or hunting down compatibility between ARM and MIPS based routers. I finally took the plunge and bought myself a mini pc with an Intel N100.

The thing has 4 cores (no SMT), a 6W TDP and boosts to 3.4 GHz and can support 16GB of ram. The mini pc I bought cost me $200, includes the processor as well 4x Intel 10Gbps Ethernet ports. At 6W, it needs no fan, and the whole chassis is metal and specifically designed to act as a heatsink, which means 0 noise and 0 moving parts.

I ran a power virus on it for a few hours to test the thermals, and on a warm day in Melbourne, after hours of having all 4 cores running full throttle, CPU temperature never exceeded 90 C and the chassis barely hit 55 C.

The best thing about it? Full upstream support for any Linux distro and FreeBSD. No more wondering if this particular Broadcom chipset needs a weird binary blob, no more being hostage to an OEM and having to run old forked kernels.

I installed OPNSense on it, VESA mounted it behind our TV, and it hasn’t been seen or heard since. Not only has it been the most reliable router I’ve ever had at home, it’s providing various other services such as DNS server, apt cache, WireGuard server and client etc for my homelab.

I’ve been waiting for ARM to get here since ARMv8 was announced in 2011, but it just hasn’t happened.

Long live x86.

jeffbee

3 hours ago

It's long been possible (since Alder Lake at the latest) to tune Intel CPUs for task energy consumption competitive with Apple Silicon, but bone-headed OEMs including Apple always tuned them the other way, wasting a lot of power for tiny performance gains. It is inappropriate to say that you evaluated the perf per watt on a Core Ultra 7 265K because what you really evaluated was how HP, Lenovo, or Dell configured that chip. But for years it has been the case that with one of the Atom variants (Gracemont, Skymont, ___mont) tuned to non-ridiculous scaling modes (capped at 2GHz, say) the energy story is quite good. The Apple platform does not have eager scaling and this is part of their efficiency story.

dyauspitr

5 hours ago

Well, they beat even TSMC on performance so they’re at least halfway there.

bitwize

2 hours ago

Betteridge's Law of Headlines

varispeed

7 hours ago

Why people are excited about Intel barely matching already outdated CPUs of the competition?

Shouldn't we be concerned that the company instead of aiming for the leap is producing legacy hardware destined for landfill?

Wake me up when Intel produces something groundbreaking.

margalabargala

6 hours ago

Comments like this one remind me of all the people saying "China can't invent things, they can only copy the US" 20 years ago.

Like, we're comparing a new Dell to a Mac released only 4 months ago. How did you feel about the Mac Neo then, and now? Is it also legacy hardware destined for the landfill?

geerlingguy

6 hours ago

Not only that, the efficiency (FP64, HPL) is also beating all the M4/M3/M2/M1 systems I've tested besides the M4 Mac mini: https://github.com/geerlingguy/top500-benchmark#results

I think the bigger news is Intel's made a chip that isn't just pushing clocks to hit some performance number, they've actually tuned clocks for efficiency... which also leads to much better battery life.

And the fan on the system in the original article[1] also allows the Intel system to run substantially faster for longer tasks (where the Neo thermally saturates and has to stay throttled).

(The iGPU is another matter... sadly still a bit lacking.)

I'm hoping Intel makes a follow-up to the N100-series chips with just four of their newer low power E-cores.

[1] https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2026/excited-for-intel-eff...

GeekyBear

6 hours ago

Efficiency is one thing.

Efficiency and performance is another.

We've long known that pushing clock speeds results in diminishing efficiency, so it's about time we see Intel stop pushing the clocks (and power) so hard that the chip melts down and the battery drains quickly.

lowbloodsugar

6 hours ago

Ok so Intel managed to make a 20W TDP chip that gets 6.x Gflops/W. Call me back when they’ve got a chip that still gets 6.x Gf/W with a 200W 1,200Gflop package like the M3 next on your list. This little fellow is only 50% more efficient than my aging M1 Max!

It’s great that they are making progress. Competition is good. They certainly need good news right now. I have exactly one intel cpu in my house in a NUC I got off eBay and it’s about to be replaced by my M4 mini. My other x86 are Zen (threadripper, 5800x3d, 5950s).

lostlogin

5 hours ago

> I have exactly one intel cpu in my house in a NUC I got off eBay and it’s about to be replaced by my M4 mini.

Do some tests pre and post upgrade. It’s ridiculous how efficient the mini is. My power usage is about 1/12 what it was with a Nuc.

geerlingguy

5 hours ago

Yeah, the first step is they realize pushing clocks is not the most important thing; second step is to apply that to other chips they make too! I want to see more desktop and server chips getting closer to Arm efficiency.

dochtman

6 hours ago

I don’t think it’s completely unfair to say that the Neo is based on a chip that was first announced in Sep 2024 while the Intel chip is from Apr 2026.

Also, I think the battery life most people are practically interested in is more like running (close to) idle and less like the number of Watts spent when running maxed out, and I wouldn’t be surprised if Arm chips still win on that metric…

MBCook

6 hours ago

Plus it’s a phone chip. Yeah it’s used in the Neo but it’s no M5.

It’s good Intel got to this point, but you can’t declare them tied with Apple. They qualified for the real race, which us great, but they're not going to win with that chip.

hamandcheese

5 hours ago

Doesn't it being a phone chip make the efficiency claim more impressive, not less?

Moreover, from tfa:

> This Dell also beats out both M4 and M3 Mac Studios, only failing to the M4 Mac Mini at 7.57 Gflops/W.

MBCook

3 hours ago

I haven’t followed the PC chip business anywhere near as much as I used to around the turn of the millennium. I was under the impression Intel actually made a few chips that could go quite low power. The problem was their performance sucked.

It’s good that this performs good and can go low power, but the big question to me is whether they can scale it up without it becoming a power sucking furnace.

There’s no other comment somewhere in here, where someone is pointing out that that was in FP64, which is not something most people use. Especially people who are going to buy a computer like this.

I suspect for me personally, integer use matters far, far, far more than anything else.

Archit3ch

an hour ago

> in FP64, which is not something most people use

It's used in audio processing. But large DAW sessions need something beefier than both tested devices (Macbook Neo, XPS).

re-thc

6 hours ago

> Comments like this one remind me of all the people saying "China can't invent things, they can only copy the US" 20 years ago.

We still get these comments. Now about AI. China can only distill and are still years behind. Well well...

oofbey

6 hours ago

Really curious to see how ByteDance’s 10T model works out.

throw-the-towel

an hour ago

If Intel is competitive with Apple again, this should be good for the customer.

intrasight

16 minutes ago

"competing" is not the same thing as "competitive". Apple is 1-2 years ahead. If they remain so indefinitely into the future then Intel is not competitive.

WithinReason

5 hours ago

If you normalise for both process node and clock speed, AMD and Apple are tied on single threaded perf/watt, and AMD Zen 5c cores have about a 12% perf/area advantage.

amelius

4 hours ago

Whoever used the most recent TSMC node will have the best specs.

My guess is that even the designs of the transistors and perhaps logic gates are IP blocks owned by TSMC and not whoever wants to get their chip fabricated.