abhibeckert

bigmushroom said:

Not sure, what you mean with VP9 being proprietary - it's open sourced with a waver on all patent claims. However, it's not an ITU standard such as HEVC.

VP9 was developed by Google exclusively, unlike HEVC which was developed by the the United Nations. The ITU is responsible for other technology you may have heard of such as JPEG and MP3, or and others you're using but may not be familiar like our telephone and broadband network protocols.

Google's waiver on patent claims is only available for companies that "do not engage in patent litigation" which means any large tech corporation will have to negotiate a patent license off Google to use VP9. They are not eligible for the waiver. And there are probably dozens of patent trolls who own patents that might apply to VP9.

But the real reason, in my opinion, is that hardware decoding for VP9 isn't widely available, and since the Apple TV is designed to draw about 2 Watts of power while streaming a video, software decoding simply isn't possible. I wouldn't be surprised if a desktop PC processor draws 100 watts or more while playing a 4K VP9 video.

The Apple TV processor is probably fast enough to decode VP9 for a short video, but I think an hour or more is likely to cause overheating issues since it doesn't have any fans.

hackintoisier said:

Alder lake already beats m1 max at many tasks.

On what tasks? Alder lake does ok a lot of benchmarks (if you ignore power consumption). But on real world tasks M1 is usually significantly faster, not because of math performance, but fundamentals like memory latency and bandwidth.

The power thing is critical - Apple is holding back by making sure the CPU/GPU rarely draw a significant amount of power. On benchmarks like Cinebench where Alder Lake just barely beats the M1 Pro Max, it's only drawing 11 Watts according to Anandtech. Which means it run the benchmark for about *9 hours* on battery. I'm not sure what an Alder Lake CPU draws, but I wouldn't be surprised if it's 10x more, maybe even starting at 20x more before thermal throttling kicks in.

The thing people defending Intel forget is Apple is perfectly capable of selling a Mac that lasts 2 hours under heavy load. They've been selling those Macs for years with Intel chips. Because Apple has decided to stop doing that, comparisons aren't really fair.

My prediction is when Apple starts shipping proper desktops on Apple Silicon, ones with a 980W power supply, then we'll really find out what Apple's chipset design team can do. And I don't think it's going to be pretty for Intel.