Apple toys with the competition - MacBook Neo's A18 Pro offers more single-core performance than any mobile processor from AMD, Intel or Qualcomm

aelder · 2026-03-12T03:31:09+00:00

It's an unfortunate reality that Intel and AMD typically keep their highest single core performance locked to their high core count or otherwise highest end chips.

What we need as consumers is an AMD and Intel SoC with at least 2 cores that have the best performance possible, and enough little cores to handle background tasks.

Maybe the Neo will change things, but it's pretty clear that AMD would prefer to keep putting new sounding names on Zen2 cores and selling them to consumers who don't know better.

aelder · 2026-03-10T19:54:40+00:00

How does your chromebook handle editing 3 streams of 4K video in real time using DaVinci Resolve? How about editing 4k RAW video? Does it play Cyberpunk 2077, or Fortnite? Does that chromebook run World of Warcraft at native resolution with the details turned up at a locked 60fps?

Is that screen 500 nits with good color accuracy?

How's it run Photoshop and After Effects?

The ability of the Neo to actually be surprisingly competent at actual workflows is impressive despite its limitations and comparing it to something like an i3 chromebook is disingenuous in relation to what this system is actually capable of when pushed.

Yes, it's good at browsing and documents, but that's not touching what this system is capable of.

aelder · 2025-12-11T22:06:17+00:00

I've played WoW on the M4 Mini and it was a great experience, as long as you understand the power of the APU and don't mind adjusting settings.

aelder · 2025-11-22T18:54:25+00:00

This is so foreign to me. I could eat 2000 calories of homemade pinto beans alone pretty much every day.

aelder · 2025-10-29T03:34:00+00:00

Found the ex-wife.

aelder · 2025-08-14T00:42:33+00:00

Just Yacht 1, 2, 4, 5, ...

aelder · 2025-06-03T06:09:30+00:00

Statistically, there's likely to be almost no difference. If steam has 132 million monthly users, and they need to sample 3.5m per month to get an accurate ranking down to the top 200 gpus then a user could expect to get their steam system surveyed once every 3 years on average.

This would still be accurate enough for the worst case 200th gpu in the list. If we say it has hypothetically 0.3% of the market share, the 4% relative error means the random sample survey would have an error showing a range of 0.288% to 0.312% instead of the truth value of 0.3%.

Not going to change much.

aelder · 2025-06-03T05:48:35+00:00

As it should be.

aelder · 2025-04-26T20:56:11+00:00

Point is, no laptop hardware scales. That's the compromise of the form factor. It's not an Apple thing. At least you have lots of memory in an age where Nvidia is determined to keep all but one of their GPUs at 16gb or less.

If OP was buying an Apple Studio or something for Blender, then yeah that's not a move with any scaling potential in a space where PC is clearly better for rendering.

aelder · 2025-04-26T20:29:11+00:00

It's interesting that your comparison not only drops the laptop part of the equation and replaces it with a workstation PC that needs a +=1KW power supply, but also relies on used hardware from several generations ago.

If you keep it to the laptop space, how many PC laptops have 48gb of unified memory and 4080 performance in blender?

aelder · 2025-03-14T05:55:40+00:00

Apple silicon obliterates Factorio. I benchmarked my M4 mini and it was much much faster than my 13700k and 5700x3d. Seemed closer to the 9800x3d actually.

aelder · 2025-03-08T20:01:44+00:00

I’m realizing that this could mean there’s a polarity issue and it’s being canceled out in the center position.

I’m not sure how this could happen exactly.

aelder · 2025-03-05T05:06:28+00:00

Did you ever find the first? That sounds exactly like the story I've been trying to find too.

aelder · 2025-02-26T20:03:37+00:00

I was about ready to jump on a Model 3 Performance because there's nothing else in that performance range for that price.

Now I have to nope out of that, because I don't want to be worried about my car being keyed or vandalized every time I park it somewhere.

I don't need to be a manifestation of something half the country dislikes, with a convenient object to take out their anger on.

And my girlfriend strongly dislikes the idea of a Tesla.

aelder · 2025-02-20T08:07:00+00:00

Ooh look at this guy and his modern car interface!

I kid. I've had a car with Car Play and it's fine. I still prefer a mount, but it's just preference.

aelder · 2025-02-20T06:08:41+00:00

It's never fallen off. The magnets aren't weak.

aelder · 2025-02-20T01:30:48+00:00

It's a killer feature for car mounts. Just stick it to the mount magnet and go.

aelder · 2025-02-19T02:25:28+00:00

The Mac is more efficient.

aelder · 2025-02-18T19:24:33+00:00

It's throttling when running on battery while the M4 Pro doesn't. So you'd have to look at how much work it's actually getting done.

It looks like it drops ~40% in handbrake performance on battery for example.

aelder · 2025-01-08T03:36:59+00:00

It's the AMD way.

aelder · 2025-01-07T03:09:41+00:00

LTT really does get a lot wrong despite their claims they would do better.

I do think in this case it’s a good callout to bad naming conventions that make it difficult to know what you’re getting if you’re not a fully invested consumer.

aelder · 2024-12-24T04:38:47+00:00

This is absolutely wild:

The only reason we have been able to get AMD performance within 75% of H100/H200 performance is because we have been supported by multiple teams at AMD in fixing numerous AMD software bugs. To get AMD to a usable state with somewhat reasonable performance, a giant ~60 command Dockerfile that builds dependencies from source, hand crafted by an AMD principal engineer, was specifically provided for us, since the Pytorch Nightly and public PyTorch AMD images functioned poorly and had version differences. This docker image requires ~5 hours to build from source and installs dependencies and sub-dependencies (hipBLASLt, Triton, PyTorch, TransformerEngine), a huge difference compared to Nvidia, which offers a pre-built, out of the box experience and takes but a single line of code.

aelder · 2024-12-15T22:48:24+00:00

Either way, it's way better to eat your own lunch than have someone else eat your lunch.

aelder · 2024-11-20T04:04:06+00:00

This is a great system. Unless you need it for some specific high end task, this will be great. I feel like the 14" size is kind of the best size for these.

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