CES has always been a place to showcase the latest achievements of technology companies, and it has been this year as well. At CES 2022, Intel and AMD unveiled their latest processors for the laptop market. Next to these companies is Apple, which is showing off its strength in the market with M series chips. Buyers now have more choice than ever before, but what strategies do these companies seek to attract buyers?
In recent years, lithographs of desktop, laptop, and, of course, mobile processors have gotten smaller and smaller, yet companies have focused on different thermal design (TDP) capabilities. These processors are marketed with thermal design capabilities of 9 to 15, 28 to 64 watts and 45 to 115 watts, which are the latest category processors, similar to desktop versions.
Hybrid architecture in the world of smartphones
To date, most laptop processors use only one type of core, powerful or low-power, which is different from what we have seen in the mobile world in recent years. When Arm unveiled the big.LITTLE design, it pointed out that by placing two different core architectures on one silicon, higher energy efficiency could be achieved while still providing users with high power.
Today, almost all smartphones use chips that have large cores with high power and small cores with low power consumption. Data and tasks are split between these two cores and the operating system can manage them.
This kind of architecture is very useful in the world of smartphones, but what about the world of laptops and computers? Intel pointed out nearly 10 years ago that there was no need for the big.LITTLE architecture in the world of processors in this class, and instead switched to dynamic or variable frequency and voltage technology. But this approach did not work, and eventually Intel moved toward hybrid architecture.
In the company’s latest processors, the twelfth generation Core processors called Alder Lake, I no longer face a kind of microarchitecture, and Intel has moved to the famous hybrid architecture or big.LITTLE. Despite this approach, Intel, its longtime rival AMD, has not yet embarked on such an architecture and has not even mentioned its plans to step in that direction. AMD uses a heterogeneous combination of CPU and GPU in its APUs, but we have a homogeneous design in its CPUs.
Thermal design performance and power: Apple vs. x86
For their processors, Intel and AMD measure heat dissipation by a measure called TDP, or thermal design power, and TDP is not equivalent to total system power consumption. This criterion refers to the amount of heat that the processor emits in normal work and is an aid to companies in designing cooling systems.
Intel and AMD define thermal design power based on base frequency rather than boost frequency, and processors can go higher TDPs for a short time. Laptop manufacturers can control how the CPU behaves. For example, one company switches to a lower frequency and even disables the turbo mode to keep the laptop temperature from rising. But compared to another manufacturer, it prefers high performance to production temperature as well as battery charging. So laptops with the same processors can perform differently.
In general, TDP is not a perfect measure, but it is a relatively good benchmark.
Apple does not use the concept of TDP in its processor information, so to find out about Apple M silicon power consumption, we need to look at systems equipped with them. According to the Anandtech website, the power consumption of the M1 Max chip in heavy activity is in the range of 30 to 50 watts, while this consumption for the M1 chip in the Mac mini is up to 21 watts. So we are dealing with chips in the direction of 15 to 55 watt and 28 to 64 watt processors.
Thermal design performance and power: Apple vs. x86
In this article, we will focus more on x86 processors with a basic thermal design power of 28 watts or less, as processors with a TDP above 45 watts are more similar to desktop processors than low-power processors.
