> So Qualcomm is onto something here.

Yeah. Using 12 cores to get 16% more performance than an 8-core processor gets.

The odd thing is that the Qualcomm CPU is 89% as fast as the M3 in a single core test.

It shouldn't take 12 cores to achieve dominance.

Power limits probably affect this. And scaling cores isn't linear, their cores clearly scale poorly.

Though Geekbench particularly scales poorly with cores.

Yeah, that would be like using 12 valves in an engine instead of 8 valves to get 16% more performance!

I think pistons instead of valves would work better for your analogy.

I thought about that for a hot minute before making the analogy and in previous years I would have agreed. The cores are doing the work, after all. But CPUs nowadays are so different nowadays compared to yesteryear.

In one CPU you have cores of different sizes and different speeds, and there are various ways to connect them to each other, and interplay with cache subsystems etc.

Anyways it doesn't matter. If I put in a certain number of watts and money and get a certain performance out, what does it matter how?

(It's not like I when I had to buy 8 sparkplugs for my V8 engine instead of 4 sparkplugs for my straigt 4 engine when doing service.)

> In one CPU you have cores of different sizes and different speeds

In this case yeah, but not all of them. I believe AMD still makes some desktop CPUs without those compromises, but they're still slowly starting to put out CPUs like the 7950X3D that have crippled cache on certain cores (7950X does not, 7800X3D does not).

Of course big.LITTLE has been a thing in ARM for decades, including ASi. But I believe Intel started doing E-cores because they were starting to run into space and thermal constraints, and now AMD is exploring heterogeneous architectures as well. I hope they won't repeat the same mistakes.

They are certainly different cores.

But above a certain threshold of performance, what matters to me as a consumer is perf/$.

Also keep in mind that they compared to the MacBook Air model which doesn't have fans for cooling and Geekbench is known to be a short burst benchmark. So Qualcomm's multicore performance lead might be larger for continuous usage.

The Qualcomm has 12 high performance cores. The Apple one has 4 performance cores and 4 efficiency cores that deliver 1/3 to 1/2 the performance. The Apple M3 Max had 12 performance cores and 4 efficiency cores, but that’s also a lot more expensive.

I mean...............yes, you're right. But at the end of the day if the CPU is faster at the same energy used(I assume it is), then the end user won't care whether the CPU is 1, 8 or 128 cores(and why should they).

It's like people saying that Apple products are inferior because they usually have less ram than competition - and yes, that's technically true, but in practice it literally doesn't matter, they are still usually just as fast if not faster than competition with more ram - so why should the end user care.

That's just stupid wishful thinking from all the Apple propaganda. With the limited amount of RAM they have, the base level Macs are not as able as some other laptops that may be slower in computational power, (at least on paper and in short Geekbench). In fact, the moment you end up using swap, some workflows can become twice as fast on much slower and way cheaper laptops.

There are countless videos/ressources illustrating that by now so you may want to stop talking shit.

Some people may be just fine with 8GB but for most peoples who actually want to pay a bit more for computers this limitation will come up pretty fast, in fact I'm pretty sure many peoples heavily using computer have a baseline usage of around 8Go bare minimum (OS plus regular utilities plus minimum web browser load).

It’s not the same energy used, the Snapdragon uses more

And without unified memory I assume, and probably smaller caches.