EPYC Turin Dense is TSMC 3nm and AmpereOne is TSMC 5nm, so that's to be expected.
Given that most (all?) cutting-edge chips use TSMC nowadays, can you really have an apples-to-Apples comparison if the chips being compared aren't on the same process node?
Unless you're comparing price/performance, since nowadays there's no guarantee that a process shrink will get you significantly cheaper transistors (RIP, Dr. Moore).
It's a what you can buy today vs. what you can buy today comparison. Ampere chose to use N5 even though N3 was available and they are paying for that decision.
Ampere MSRP $5.5K vs $14K for the EPYC. With 1.6x worse performance at 1.2x better energy consumption. Looks like a reasonable option, and the more options the merrier.
>since nowadays there's no guarantee that a process shrink will get you significantly cheaper transistors
That is because all cutting-edge chips use TSMC.
No competition means price per transistor can stay consistent or even rise, which is one part of why most modern CPUs and GPUs have price/performance ratios that are the same or worse than their previous-generation counterparts.
>can you really have an apples-to-Apples comparison if the chips being compared aren't on the same process node?
Of course not, but that isn't going to stop people from doing it, nor is it going to stop people from going "x86 is dead" when comparing last-gen-node AMD processors to CPUs only Apple can use (conveniently forgetting that Qualcomm's products underperform at the same process node).
It is quite difficult to compare the true efficiency of Apple and non-Apple computers, because only few useful applications can run on both kinds of computers and because typically those who use non-Apple computers do not have direct access to any Apple computer, while those who use Apple computers usually have never used a good non-Apple computer (I would not consider any of the old Intel-based Apple computers as good).
Of the very few benchmarks that can compare Apple with non-Apple, I have never seen any where an M3 was 2-3x more efficient than Lunar Lake, so a link would be appreciated.
On the contrary, most if not all benchmarks showing battery lifetimes were showing better values for Lunar Lake, implying better efficiency.
Other than by the battery lifetime I cannot see how you can test the efficiency of an Apple computer, except by using a power and energy measurement instrument on the wall socket, because in none of the reviews about Apple computers have I seen any mention about accurate internal power sensors exposed to the user.
An M3 is definitely much more efficient in single-threaded execution than Lunar Lake, which is due to having a higher IPC and a lower clock frequency.
On the other hand, in multithreaded applications there is very little efficiency difference between different CPU microarchitectures that are implemented in the same TSMC process.
GCC tends to be a filesystem benchmark on the side, so the OS and SSD matter a lot.
Gimp and Firefox benchmarks are likely affected by UI library/API differences.
I propose ramdisk-only from-scratch compilation of a large Rust project in a loop. For AC you can measure power use externally, for battery I don't know if there's anything better than self-reported µAh/µWh counters.
Obviously, there are a lot of open-source applications that can be run on Apple computers.
However I have never seen published benchmarks for them.
A benchmark that would be valid for comparing the efficiency of an Apple computer with a non-Apple computer would be to compile using gcc a big software project. A cross-compilation of the project would be more accurate, because for a native compilation target the compiled files might be not the same.
Shouldn't all the credits go to TSMC anyway? I mean coming up with an architecture for a GPU is no small feat, but it's nothing compared to building a fab with the capabilities of TSMC's.
Given that most (all?) cutting-edge chips use TSMC nowadays, can you really have an apples-to-Apples comparison if the chips being compared aren't on the same process node?
Unless you're comparing price/performance, since nowadays there's no guarantee that a process shrink will get you significantly cheaper transistors (RIP, Dr. Moore).