this post was submitted on 12 Sep 2024
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Apple's A18 delivers solid performance gains, challenges Ryzen 9 9950X in single-core Geekbench (www.tomshardware.com)
submitted 2 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (2 children)

I have to demonstrate to my friends every time how my MBP M2 blows my Ryzen 5950x desktop out of the water for my professional line of work.

I can’t catch quite the drift what x86/x64 chips are good for anymore, other than gaming, nostalgia and spec boasting.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

I have a 5950X computer and a Mac mini with some form of M2.

I render video on the M2 computer because I have that sweet indefinite Final Cut Pro license, but then I copy it to the 5950X computer and use ffmpeg to recompress it, which is like an order of magnitude faster than using the M2 computer to do the video compression.

I have some other tasks I’ve given both computers and when the 5950X actually gets to use all its cores, it blows the M2 out of the water.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Is it possible you’re using your desktop’s GPU for ffmpeg encoding, and not the CPU, by chance?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago

No, you need to manually specify that, and the options are more limited, so I usually do CPU encoding unless I’m prioritizing encoding speed over quality for some reason. (And yes, I have verified it’s using the CPU by looking at the CPU usage while it’s encoding).

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago

I can’t catch quite the drift what x86/x64 chips are good for anymore, other than gaming, nostalgia and spec boasting.

Probably two things:

  • Cost- and power-no-object performance, which isn't necessarily a positive as it encourages bad behaviour.
  • The platform is much more open, courtesy of some quirks of how IBM spec'ed BIOS back before the dawn of time. Yes, you can get ARM and RISC-V licenses (openPOWER is kind of a non-entity these days) and design your own SBC, but every single ARM and RISC-V machine boots differently, while x86 and amd64 have a standard boot process.

All those fancy "CoPilot ready" Qualcomm machines? They're following the same path as ARM-based smartphones have, where every single machine is bespoke and you're looking for specific boot images on whatever the equivalent of xda-developers is, or (and this is more likely) just scrapping them when they're used up, which will probably happen a lot faster, given Qualcomm's history with support.

I'd love to see a replacement for x86/amd64 that isn't a power suck, but has an open interface to BIOS.