verne arase

thadec said:

verne arase said:

It would've also been useful for you to tell us that Geekbench has gone up from $14.99 to $99 - a 660% increase.

Of course you can get it now for the special discount price of $79 - but it's still nuts for a benchmarking tool (and still a 527% increase).

Unless you're MAX TECH this isn't a tool you use every day - and it's waaayyy overpriced for what it does.

The flip side is that you get a lot more free features now than you did before. And that is actually better. If you are a hobbyist, then you benefit from the extra free features. But if you are a professional - i.e. a journalist or researcher - then this is a "cost of doing business" that you can expense to whoever writes your paychecks. The only people that I can think of that could potentially be hurt by this are the small time tech bloggers on a tight budget. 

But, the article didn't mention the free tier at all. Nor did it mention that one of the main motivators for changing the formula was the increased significance of big.LITTLE (not just mobile SOCs, but Apple, Intel, Qualcomm and MediaTek use them in PC CPUs) and integrated graphics (again, chiefly motivated by the need to compare Apple M1, M2 and soon M3 systems to x86 workstations with discrete graphics). 

Huh … well, the chimps didn't mention it either when they offered me an upgrade.

Not that it was an upgrade - it was a repurchase of the whole shebang with a tiny discount.

That was fine when the price was $14.99 - not so fine when it's a $99 product.

It wasn't until later when I started to think that it was really expensive that I checked back on the old Geekbench purchases and found they had traditionally been $14.99.

Any way, my fault for not looking more closely at the situation - but good to know if you haven't pulled the trigger yet.

Whenever you compare performance between Wintel and Mac laptops, it's almost always necessary to compare them on and off the power adaptor.

Wintel laptops can have superior performance nowadays, but only on power - since they consume so much juice, they generally have to throttle waaayy back when running on battery. They're also a lot noisier since they need to run fans to keep the chips from burning up.

My laptop is still a M1 Max 32 core GPU - and it's consistent energy efficiency means I don't have to lug around a power brick since this beast will last all day no matter what I do.

This is in stark contrast to my 2019 16" MacBook Pro which required me to carry around a backpack with power brick and dongles - with the 2021 I just carry it around in a leather sleeve.

If you're just going to use your laptop as a portable desktop, Windows laptops can be a cheaper performant alternative - but if you want long battery life, nothing beats the new Apple Silicon MacBooks.

It would've also been useful for you to tell us that Geekbench has gone up from $14.99 to $99 - a 660% increase.

Of course you can get it now for the special discount price of $79 - but it's still nuts for a benchmarking tool (and still a 527% increase).

Unless you're MAX TECH this isn't a tool you use every day - and it's waaayyy overpriced for what it does.

Are these disgruntled employees?

Doesn't seem to me to be a grudge, but simply Apple trying to compete.

It doesn't at all look like harboring a grudge, though I would certainly understand if there was some resentment.

I'm sure there were a pallet's worth of dead iPhones littering the floor of Google labs while Google worked on the second coming of Android.

DuhSesame said:

In Steam's own hardware survey, 92% of people are using CPUs with 8 or fewer cores, meaning most people are using Ryzen 7s. We can safely say that M2 Max will be more powerful than 92% of personal computers.

However, 8-core is only considered as mid-tiers.

Meanwhile, the best-selling chip from Intel is the Core i5, which is at least 10-core.

This is wrong on so many fronts it’s hard to quantify - unless you’re running a server with a transaction dispatched on each core, additional cores are simply a crutch for a CPU manufacturer who can’t or won’t put in the effort to design a faster CPU.

The real metric which should interest workstation level users is single core speed - single core speed has the greater influence on perceived speed than any other single factor.

x86/64 improves single core speed by bumping up clocks which increases heat generation exponentially which then must be cooled to keep the CPU from burning up - Apple Silicon does this by making the CPU wider which allows the CPU to peer deeply into the execution queue and parallelize instruction execution. Ever since the A14's Firestorm cores Apple Silicon has been able to peer 690 instructions forward in the execution queue, and with a massive reorder buffer and multiple redundant arithmetic units and has an out-of-order execution unit capable of running up to eight instructions simultaneously. Now multiply that by 6 or 8 high performance cores.

Oh, and the high efficiency cores have been sped up considerably too.

I believe that Apple has also increased the memory cache so Trans Lookaside Buffer stalls will no longer be an issue from too many developers simply porting graphic logic across from Wintel graphics workflows and not reengineering graphic workflows to properly use Tile Based Deferred Rendering keeping intermediate graphic results out in tile memory (using immediate mode in a step by step rote port).