*Looks at a 5y old G14 that gives a modern m4 Air a run for its money.
Yeah, Imma call BS on that. Apple has a handful of product lines that share vertically integrated components that allows them the economies of scale to integrate great things like their glass trackpad in cheaper models like the air. That said, there are several premium laptops at the same price tags than Apple that are arguably a better choice than the Apple offerings, the aforementioned G14 among them, especially if one takes linux compatibility seriously.
boonhet@sopuli.xyz 7 hours ago
The CPU in the 2025 G14 seems to give the M4 Air a run for its money, I wouldn’t be so sure about a 5 year old one though unless you got a very high spec one. The G14 does have a much better GPU and display than the Air, but that’s sorta expected at close to twice the price.
verdi@feddit.org 6 hours ago
After 5y the 5900HS is still a compelling alternative to the M4.
If one would run a 2t cinebench vs 1t on the Apple silicon the 5900 would have competitive single core performance too. (Apple lacks SMT)
This is two nodes behind and with 2 cores less. If people stopped using geekbench for laptops and PCs, this stupid Apple narrative would go away. Apple makes great laptops but they aren’t the best and are arguably worse because they lock you into Apple’s commercial relationships with software providers. There’s HW acceleration for Adobe software but none for D’Assault software or Siemens software. Apple is the machine for the dilletante, and because most content creators are dilletantes, the message that passes is Apple centric. If Apple and Apple users were to evaporate, the world would carry on as usual, if linux machines would disappear overnight it would be utter chaos.
boonhet@sopuli.xyz 4 hours ago
In multithreaded, yes, it gets close using 16 threads. Which of course is what matters if your application can make full use of all 16 threads, but that’s uncommon sadly. I’d argue that even the 10 threads of the M4 at full load are an unrealistic workload. Most applications are not embarrassingly parallel.
Single threaded, it loses to the M1 which was available in the Macbook Air, a significantly cheaper laptop than the G14.
It would be a completely useless benchmark. The entire reason single threaded performance is tested is for applications that run most or all of their workload in a single thread. Which unfortunately is still pretty common even today, and for many applications isn’t really a problem that could feasibly be solved.
For applications that aren’t embarrassingly parallel, but also aren’t fully single threaded, the truth lies somewhere between the single threaded benchmark (in which the 5900HS isn’t very good) and the multi threaded (in which the 5900HS IS very good).
If you’re going to sing the 5900HS’s praises, maybe mention the fact that in multithreaded Cinebench, it (barely, but still) beats out the M1 Max, which was a MONSTER of a CPU for its time, it was such an improvment over the core i9 in the previous 16" MBP that it wasn’t even funny. Unlike the M4, it was also only available in a much more expensive laptop than the G14.
If you go current gen, the R9 270/8945HS in the G14 still loses to the M4 in single thread. And the M4 Air is 1000 euros cheaper than the G14 where I live. AMD wins in the multi core, but once you get to the M4 Pro you can have in a laptop that has a similar price (just a little bit more expensive) to the G14, Apple wins in multi core too. Also the M4 is getting on in age, you can now get the M5 in a Macbook Pro for a bit less than a G14. Sadly it’ll be a few more months till we can get it in the Air.
TL;DR: Comparing same generation, Apple’s cheapest CPU has a lower multi core Cinebench score than AMD’s highest, but higher single core. Go up in price and Apple has higher multi core too. Cross-gen comparisons are pointless. This all falls apart if you prioritize GPU over CPU, in which case you should stay far away from Apple.