(I still need it for some x86 vagrant boxes I have though!)
But when will any of that show up? Hardware takes time but I just don’t see reviewers demanding it. They’ll be happy if it shows up but they’re not calling out “this isn’t good enough” and I just don’t get it. How can they use an M1 and go back to a hot low battery life Intel laptop in the same price class and say “this is fine?”
To me, the performance per watt is increasingly important not only as we start approaching branch circuit limits (1200-1500W max in the US), but also as (in many places) energy prices continue to rise.
Both idle power consumption (e-state, core sleeping, etc.) and max power consumption (with a few measures of work per watt) should be highlighted in any serious review, probably on par with whatever other benchmarks (like Cinebench, Blender, etc.).
As long people don’t do that everything will continue as normal. It needs to be very clear you’re not doing good enough.
As long as reviewers keep ignoring the elephant in the room in their text and scores, how are you ever going to get what I’m guessing just about everyone wants? They may not know it (us Mac users were getting annoyed at heat and noise but didn’t know how much).
But I’m convinced if someone built it, users would come out of the woodwork. So many people doing “office” work that doesn’t require high power machines would benefit. Qualcomm just doesn’t seem to be trying very hard in the computer segment.
When they tried in the 90s they went broke and had to be bailed out by Microsoft.
Current generation Intel / AMD desktop CPUs have similar performance to apple's M1/M2 chips. They just consume a lot more power. (Though apparently applying a slight underclock makes a huge difference.)
I'm not sure how recent intel / AMD laptop performance compares, but a PC with an x86 chip is still a great choice.
This is the thing I’m stuck on. Computers are all roughly the same speed, for the point of this discussion.
But there is no contest in power. If you’re in the Windows world you have no good choices. Fast and hot to very slow and cool.
Where is the “pretty fast and nicely cool” choice? Someone proved it can exist.
But it’s not there and people don’t seem to be very upset about that. And I’m surprised.
Could Windows have better battery life? Probably only by dropping backward compatibility and moving to a Linux kernel or something radical.
