Sean M (sean.delete@this.none.com) on June 16, 2022 2:53 pm wrote:
> > Even a 50% performance difference wouldn't get someone wanting a Mac to switch to Windows, or someone
> > who has always bought Windows to buy a Mac.
>
> I agree.
>
> > Now if the gap was 2x that might change, but there's no
> > chance we'll ever see anything remotely close to that.
>
> M2 is less than half the power of Alder Lake at the same performance so it should be possible
> for Apple Silicon to have double the multithreaded CPU performance of x86 at the same power.
> Apple Silicon could also have double the neural net inference performance of x86. Mac applications
> could also feel 2x snappier than Windows applications because macOS provides more ability to
> disable gratitious user interface animations (rather than just “reduce” them), faster operating
> system code and because of Windows collecting and uploading telemetry.


The size of the audience that cares about multithreaded performance on the high end is much smaller than the audience who cares about single thread performance on the high end. There will always be those tasks that come down to single thread performance one way or another.

Yeah, benchmarking these days is all about lots of cores and everyone likes to see benchmarks for neural net inference or rendering, but what percentage of consumers ever do those things?

It isn't a large enough addressable market for Apple to care to offer some sort of no compromise ultra high end machine that would try to compete with a dual Threadripper on its own terms i.e. at equal power draw. So yeah maybe Apple could win that battle, but how many people are out there who would buy such a beast?

I would guess the market for x MT performance with near silent hardware is a lot bigger than the market for 10x MT performance with hardware that sounds like an F16 taking off from an aircraft carrier.