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fast computer

the journal of Michael Werneburg

twenty-seven years and one million words

I'm trying to find some reliable numbers of my new Mac's power draw, because I seem to be getting far more use out of a battery charge then I was expected. I read this: "The M1-based Mac Mini under full load needs only slightly more power than the 2005 Mac Mini equipped with a PowerPC G4 at idle." Looks like you can push the M1 to consumer 39 Watts, which is about 1/3 of Ken's 9th gen i3, which I believe is the most power-efficient of the "Core" line of chips from Intel. The Mac Mini, however, is in the high-performance mode and my Macbook is in the low mode, where it's hard to find figures. For comparison I can go back to my 2nd PC, which I bought upon graduation in '94. It drew 2W to produce 11.4MIPS vs let's say worst case scenario 39W to produce at least 35000MIPS according to one thing I found. Which is -- again, at worst -- an improvement of 150x when considering operations/Watt.

Given the results of this architecture, I think the gaming & crypto communities are going to be howling for Intel to follow the integrated design.