Eric Fink (eric.delete.delete@this.this.anon.com) on June 2, 2022 5:43 am wrote:
> 5nm and yet it's peak performance and perf/watt so far are unmatched. Notebookcheck recently did
> a series of benchmarks comparing the efficiency and performance of latest CPUs at locked TDP,
> and a 5nm Firestorm at 4W outperformed a Zen 3+ at 9.5W — that's more than 2x difference in
> efficiency, and this is in a benchmark that maximally favours x86 as it runs a suboptimal code
> path on M1. I have hard time believing that TSMC's 5nm has some kind of magical properties that
> allows a vendor to reduce the power consumption by 2x at the same performance level.
>
> Your other argument — that x86 vendors trade some of the inherent efficiency to get this extra 20% performance
> has more merit IMO, but still doesn't provide a satisfactory explanation. First of all, AMD Zen3 isn't any faster
> than Firestorm, except maybe in a handful of AVX2 SIMD throughput tests where it's higher clock lets it pull
> ahead. Intel is a bit different, since they generally seem fine with making power-hungry cores if they can get
> ahead in performance (in the test linked above Golden Cove is 20% faster than Firestorm — with a whopping 6x
> higher power consumption!). But to offset this, Intel is now adding throughtput/efficiency cores, which do exactly
> what you are talking about — trade peak performance for much lower power usage. And yet, when you compare Alder
> Lake E-cores to the P-cores, the former are around 40% slower at roundly 2.5x lower power consumption (SPEC2017,
> Anandtech). In contrast, Apple's Firestorm is around 10-15% slower than Golden Cove at average 5x lower power
> consumption. I mean, there is a gap between Intel's 10nm and TSMC's 5nm, but it just isn't that much of a gap.
> If it were just "Apple trades peak performance for better efficiency", I'd expect them to be 20-30% slower with
> 2-3x lower power consumption, but they somehow do significantly better than that.
>
> I will be also very curious to see how Zen4 performs in comparison. Given the less than
> perfect information we have available, it is really difficult to ascertain how much
> influence can be attributed to the process, to the ISA, to the design philosophy or
> maybe just the elusive "magic sauce" that individual vendors bring to the table.

The link may be interpreted in a different way...

First, the latop CPU have much less cache and lower boost clock, second, the 6nm Zen 3 actually matched the efficiency of 5nm M1...

And if you look, when running a single thread Zen 3 uses almost 10W, Intel does uses even more (but the site does not says how much core power), when running all 16 threads Zen 3 uses 26W, or just 1.6W per thread, 3.2W per core, about the same power and performance as M1 core on a bigger node (but with 2 threads instead of 1).