Ask HN: Why hasn't x86 caught up with Apple M series?

16•stephenheron•1h ago

Hi,

My daily workhorse is a M1 Pro that I purchased on release date, It has been one of the best tech purchases I have made, even now it really deals with anything I throw at it. My daily work load is regularly having a Android emulator, iOS simulator and a number of Dockers containers running simultaneously and I never hear the fans, battery life has taken a bit of a hit but it is still very respectable.

I wanted a new personal laptop, and I was debating between a MacBook Air or going for a Framework 13 with Linux. I wanted to lean into learning something new so went with the Framework and I must admit I am regretting it a bit.

The M1 was released back in 2020 and I bought the Ryzen AI 340 which is one of the newest 2025 chips from AMD, so AMD has 5 years of extra development and I had expected them to get close to the M1 in terms of battery efficiency and thermals.

The Ryzen is using a TSMC N4P process compared to the older N5 process, I managed to find a TSMC press release showing the performance/efficiency gains from the newer process: “When compared to N5, N4P offers users a reported +11% performance boost or a 22% reduction in power consumption. Beyond that, N4P can offer users a 6% increase in transistor density over N5”

I am sorely disappointed, using the Framework feels like using an older Intel based Mac. If I open too many tabs in Chrome I can feel the bottom of the laptop getting hot, open a YouTube video and the fans will often spin up.

Why haven’t AMD/Intel been able to catch up? Is x86 just not able to keep up with the ARM architecture? When can we expect a x86 laptop chip to match the M1 in efficiency/thermals?!

To be fair I haven’t tried Windows on the Framework yet it might be my Linux setup being inefficient.

Cheers, Stephen

Comments

netvarun•1h ago

s/x84/x86/

rl3•50m ago

>s/x84/x86/

TIL:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopole_(company)#Racing_cars

I was kind of hoping that there was some little-known x84 standard that never saw the light of day, but instead all I found was classic French racing cars.

bigyabai•1h ago

All Ryzen mobile chips (so far) use a homogeneous core layout. If heat/power consumption is your concern, AMD simply hasn't caught up to the Big.little architecture Intel and Apple use.

In terms of performance though, those N4P Ryzen chips have knocked it out of the park for my use-cases. It's a great architecture for desktop/datacenter applications, still.

goosedragons•31m ago

Sort of. Technically the Ryzen 5 AI 340 has 3 Zen 5 cores and 3 Zen 5c cores. They are more similar than the power/efficiency cores of Apple/Intel but 5c cores are more power efficient.

roscas•1h ago

RISC vs CISC. Why you think a mainframe is so fast?

ARM is great. Those M are the only thing I could buy used and put Linux on it.

JustExAWS•1h ago

I thought people stopped believing this around 2005 when Apple users finally had to admit that PPC was behind x86.

Even though this was the case for the most part during the entire history of PPC Macs (I owned two during these years)

https://chipsandcheese.com/p/arm-or-x86-isa-doesnt-matter

matt_s•1h ago

Its fun watching things swing back and forth over time. I remember having those Sun mini-fridge size servers, all running RISC sparc based CPU's if I remember correctly. I wonder if there would be some merit in RISC based linux servers, like maybe the power consumption is lower? I forget the pros/cons of RISC vs CISC CPUs.

trashface•1h ago

I may be out of date or wrong, but I recall when the M1 came out there was some claims that x86 could never catch up, because there is an instruction decoding bottleneck (instructions are all variable size), which the M1 does not have, or can do in parallel. Because of that bottleneck x86 needs to use other tricks to get speed and those run hot.

daemonologist•36m ago

I think this is partially down to Framework being a very small and new company that doesn't have the resources to make the best use of every last coulomb, rather than an inherent deficiency of x86. The larger companies like Asus and Lenovo are able to build more efficient laptops (at least under Windows), while Apple (having very few product SKUs and full vertical integration) can push things even further.

notebookcheck.com does pretty comprehensive battery and power efficiency testing - not of every single device, but they usually include a pretty good sample of the popular options.

dmitrygr•19m ago

There is one positive to all of this. Finally, we can stop listening to people who keep saying that Apple Silicon is ahead of everyone else because they have access to better process. There are now chips on better processes than M1 that still deliver much worse performance per watt.

dapperdrake•3m ago

Go down the rabbit hole of broken compiler settings for debian default builds, if you want to see how much low-hanging fruit we still have.

Who here would be interested in testing a distro like debian with builds optimized for the Framework devices?

blacksmith_tb•9m ago

I considered getting a personal MBP (I have an M3 from work), but picked up a Framework 13 with the AMD 7 7840U. I have Pop!_OS on it, and while it isn't quite as impressive as the MBP, it is radically better than other Windows / Linux laptops I have used lately, battery life is quite good, ~5hr or so, not quite on par with the MBP but still good enough that I don't really have any complaints (and being able to up upgrade RAM / SSD / even mobo is worth some tradeoff to me, where my employers will just throw my MBP away in a few years).

dapperdrake•6m ago

How much do you like the rest of the hardware? What price would seem OK for decent GUI software that runs for a long time on batter?

Am learning x86 in order to build nice software for the Framework 12 i3 13-1315U (raptor lake). Going into the optimization manuals for intel's E-cores (apparently Atom) and AMD's 5c cores. The efficiency cores on the M1 MacBook Pro are awesome. Getting debian or Ubuntu with KDE to run this on a FW12 will be mind-boggling.

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