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Did Jeff Geerling get paid to post misleading headlines and reviews on Intel vs Apple?

He's basing this on his own "super computing benchmark" measuring only FP64 performance. Meanwhile, any normal person using these $600 laptops will never run FP64 supercomputing tasks on the CPU.

He also only showed perf/watt in this one benchmark but skipped the fact that Apple Silicon is significantly faster.

  Obviously, all this efficiency is on the low end—the laptop only achieves a little over 120 Gflops, while Apple's faster M3 and M4 Macs are pushing through up to 1.2 Teraflops.

Thank you - especially for linking the article.

Sounds like a good option. Still having fans keeps it way behind the Neo in my mind.

When the laptop is literally the thickness of a headphone jack? Because a USB-C port is less than 2mm, but a 3.5mm headphone jack port is more like 6mm. That becomes a problem when the actual shell it need to go in is 7.5mm.

Did it need to be that thin? Heck no. But it is, and yeah there is absolutely no room for one because of that decision.

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.

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.

For a school laptop it’s a unfortunate omission IMHO.

Cheap wired headphones are the default choice in the classroom, in my experience.

Bluetooth headphones that need charging aren’t really what you want.

It’s easy enough to get cheap USB headphone adapter, but still, I t would nice if it was built in.

Apple knows what they are doing sometimes it seems! :-)

I have to say, I prefer dongles lately. There are many inexpensive hifi dongles that sound great with in-ears. They’re also USB class-compliant audio devices and work everywhere. Obviously a preference, but as other commenters have mentioned, 3.5 jacks do break, and I’ve personally broken plenty.

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.

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.

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.

>> what does this cost for dell to include?

1) a few cents of components

2) the opportunity cost of selling you a high margin dongle

3) minus the risk of a lost sale if you buy a competitor

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?

Surely a usb c headset would work

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!)

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.

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.

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.

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.

>It is strange that this chip is so crazy efficient though.

Its only strange if you believe Apples lies.

The truth is, architecture doesn't matter. Single core performance, Apple was always on par with the best chips. Compute is compute, under the hood moving data costs energy, an you can't get away from that.

The reason for "efficiency" of Apple silicon it is because they spent a long time basically optimizing their chips for their specific hardware while running specific programs. Its like building an ASIC to specifically watch youtube vides. When it came to things that are not pipelinable (i.e a lot of branching), the efficieny/battery life statistics flew out the window.

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

> 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.

Yeah, not sure why Dell has such a spread on US vs rest-of-world pricing here.

I know some have mentioned the $699/$599 price could also change a bit in the US come November. The internal assembly and parts seem like they'd cost Dell a little more than Apple's cost building the Neo, so maybe in the US they're selling them closer to at cost, and subsidizing it with the Windows exclusivity and price elsewhere? Not sure, but it stinks the price only applies here. It's a good deal at $699. Harder to justify at $1,000+.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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?

Max power Intel consumer chips are already losing to Apple chips in raw performance, especially ST. Tuning them for better perf/watt by turning down the Ghz would just make them even less competitive in performance.

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?

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

Absolutely not true.

Apple leads in IPC, perf/area in CPU, and raw performance. We already have TSMC N7, N5, N4 AMD vs Apple CPUs to compare.

This isn't true because Apple's N5 CPUs are faster and more efficient than Intel's TSMC N3 CPUs (Lunar Lake).