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Cake day: November 7th, 2023

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  • its more or less that yes. they saw the money but not the time and effort to get users to use your platform.

    and its not like impossible, as long as you can create games people will play and stay at itll work (e.g Riot), but they legit put such little effort in the launchers that it was creating a negative user experience, and never put in the money to make it better.



  • me mentioning the snapdragon x elite is the situation. it doesnt have good battery life in the usecase this while topic is about (gaming). your comment sounds like you read the reviews and didnt understand which functions excelled in battery life, and which ones didnt.

    the whole point is just because something is Arm, doesnt automatically make it more efficient in all usecases. what’s the point in a gaming device thats less efficient when its gaming.


  • the thing is, people are attributing it to ARM, rather than how Apple handles their OS. its the sole reason why Snapdragon X Elite wasn’t that great on Windows, because ultimately, the problem wasn’t about x86 vs Arm, but it was about how windows handled low powered operations. If valve makes a piece of hardware that’s arm based, they clearly aren’t going to be using OSX for any reason. You can tell by the discussion because you can easily name which generation processor you run on a MBP, but fail to mention the cpu models for either the AMD nor intel powered machines and gives the aura of equivalent playing fields when it fundamentally wont.

    Just because Apple with their heavily controlled OS space can make the transition to ARM work flawlessly for batterylife doesn’t mean it applies to all other ARM devices. Arm definitely does some aspects better, but it’s not by default better in every situation due to the nature of the environment that surrounds said hardware is. The power efficiency only exists if all applications are recompiled to target said hardware. For a gaming device, it’s not going to be very useful because very few games that Valve would target have an arm based build. You get into the problem that emulators have. things like proton is a translation layer and suffers much less overhead (e.g why mobile phones can do switch emulation for instance(arm to arm based translation layer) but no phone remotely will do ps3 emulation (arm to ibm cell processor), despite console wise, being roughly the same in performance.

    It’s the sole reason why Apples dev kit for games doesn’t run games like proton does(where it can legit run games better than original if its using an older API). Because architecture changes isn’t just a translation layer, theres a layer of emulation to it, which while can be hardware accelerated if done right, is never 1:1 like a translation layer is.

    Want to test how your MBP battery life is on a different environment not entirely tailored to Apple, run Asahi Linux for example and you will notice immediately that the battery life isn’t the same. (asahi linux is a fedora based distro tailored for M series machines)


  • keep in mind, for the longest time Intels processors were still on Intels fab. a huge chunk of the efficiency/performance gains was less x86 > arn and more Intel Fab > TSMC. even to a lesser extent, compare the snapdragon 8 gen 1 to the snapdragon 8+ gen 1. Samsung wasn’t as far behind tsmc (compared to intel) at the time and both designs basically are the same chip but implemented at two different fabs.

    It also involves how manufacturers decide how to handle price performance. Most laptop manufacturers see any performance lost due to clocking it low bad for sales(so they agressively clock it higher for performance) causing louder fans. Apple takes the opposite approach, where they tune it for noise performance because they control what people see on their graphs (while being misleading, by essentially never including anything faster than it) and asking users to pay top dollar for the top tier fab runs (apple essentially has top cut priority at TSMC) so they always get to see the bleeding edge efficiency nodes/performance before anyone else does at the higher cost to them(which is then passed on to the consumer)


  • the lighter workloads isn’t like stardew valley levels workloads, it would be like watching a video level loads. Just being arm doesn’t outright make it that battery friendly, its like the non application use(e.g sleep, super basic app) where the battery level is better. The qualcomm laptop reviews kind of show that platform when its battery life is mildly better than last gen amd/intel chips and worse under gaming. Qualcomm rushed the release because they new they needed to release before AMD’s Strix Point and Intels Lunar Lake to make it look like they were more efficient. (X elite was on TSMC N4, Meteor lake was on N5/N6, Phoenix and Strix were on N4X, but they knew AMD would have the highest NPU performance had it released first.

    the BIGGEST flaw that the arm based designs have that isn’t tegra is that their graphics drivers are inferior to both Nvidia and AMD, and graphics drivers play a huge role in whether something works correctly or not.


  • i mean better efficiency is one thing, but having “so much better power efficiency” isn’t that large, especially under load. Arms major advantage is efficiency while doing lighter workloads, which is kinda the antithesis of a gaming device would be.

    What arm based designs excel at is if whatever workload utilizes some of the specific built hardware in them, which is why the modems and camera image processor on the snapdragon cpus are better than x86, because x86 designs dont really have dedicated hardware for those functions integrated fully(intel cpus do to some extent)