Will PS/XBX follow Nintendo's footsteps?

[Pemalite]

Bofferbrauer2 said:

Pemalite said:

Don't bet on it.

Bofferbrauer2 said:

Nintendo choose ARM because it was the only possible choice for their hybrid form factor. But if you want more CPU performance in gaming, X86 is still the way to go.

Not exactly. There are other chips Nintendo could have opted for.

However... nVidia likely gave Nintendo a deal that was to good to pass up... But even before the Switch released there were chips available that could have beaten the old Maxwell Tegra.

I'm not an Apple fanatic, far from it.
However... Let's not get facts in the way of a good story.

In general the Apple M1 is beating the Ryzen 4700u in integrated graphics performance.
https://www.anandtech.com/show/16252/mac-mini-apple-m1-tested/3

Apple's M1 Firestorm cores is showcasing some very impressive floating point capabilities as well in single threaded workloads.
https://www.anandtech.com/show/16252/mac-mini-apple-m1-tested/4


The Firestorm cores are also dominating Intels best mobile chips in multi-threaded scenarios and trades places with AMD depending on test.
https://www.anandtech.com/show/16252/mac-mini-apple-m1-tested/5

Some more mixed benchies:
https://www.anandtech.com/show/16252/mac-mini-apple-m1-tested/2


In general... If the dataset is very cache and bandwidth heavy, x86 will definitely win... x86 also has the advantage of higher powerlevels to fall back into... But for all intents and purposes... We cannot confused Apples Firestorm cores as your typical ARM cores, they are very wide, high performant cores with many of the large x86 core design philosophies backing it, with much less of a power penalty.


You are right that the TSMC 5nm process does give Apple an advantage over AMD and especially Intel though.

Apples M1 chip is damn impressive, able to be competitive/beat Intel and AMD at a much smaller powerlevel.

At bolded: I was purely talking about CPU performance, since that is what the initial question was about. I know the GPU is much stronger than the one in the 4800U. But for the CPU, if we really compare core vs core and not core vs thread, then the M1 loses the CPU benchmarks despite being more modern.

At italic: Like I said, the new AMcBook Air has an even stronger PSU than the old one, so much smaller power level doesn't exactly sounds true. More likely is that due to the size of the SoC, it's much easier to cool. The old MacBook Air had a 45W rated cable, the new one is rated 61W, so the whole SoC definitely can pull more power if needed.

Those benchmarks you provided are showing it to be very competitive with AMD's hardware.

Either way, Single core benchmarks where you force an application to run on a single thread aren't even relevant anymore, even web-browsers and office suites use multiple cores these days.
Then again... It is wccftech.

And while you are right that the "rated cable" has increased, that doesn't mean that power consumption has increased, Apple may have wanted a PSU with headroom to allow for degradation in the unit for reliability reasons for example, need actual power consumption numbers and not just basing all your assumptions on PSU wattage.
My PC has an 850w PSU. It will *not* draw 850w.

Lets put things in perspective here... The M1 is in the same league. It will beat AMD Ryzen, it will loose some... And there are scenarios where x86 thanks to it's higher frequency, more bandwidth and larger caches will always hold an advantage.

But we also need to take a look at the multiples performance increase ARM SoC's have had just over the last couple of years where Intel has stagnated... Apples Monolithic ARM core is definitely in a position where it can start replacing x86 chips based on performance alone... And hence why they are making those moves.