Comment by OKRainbowKid 7 days ago
The question wasn't entirely serious, no. My point is: afaik the M processors aren't actually available on the market, they only come as one component of a much more expensive product.
I don't mean to take away from how impressive they are.
You wrote
>You should only care about a set of processors that is available in the market at the same time. The M4 is available now and Zen 6 is not.
I can't buy an M4, it's not available in the market.
I don't get it. You can literally go buy it right now. You have been able to buy it for months and months by getting an Ipad. If you are saying you can't buy it because it's used inside a product then the same goes for basically all mobile processors. I can't "buy" an AMD Ryzen HX 370. I can't buy an Intel Core Ultra 258V. And neither can I "buy" a Qualcomm Snapdragon X1E-80-100. This has never even been a factor.
You are correct, the situation is similar for most mobile processors. They are unavailable on the market for consumers looking to build a system.
Apple goes one step further though: M processors aren't just unavailable to consumers, there's also no way for OEMs to build systems using these chips. In this point they differ significantly from the examples you mentioned. For people that do not want to buy into the Apple ecosystem, M chips are effectively not on the market, and benchmark comparisons to desktop or server CPUs are meaningless.
Please forgive the weird analogy, but if I'm on the market for a radio, I really don't want to buy a car just for its radio. Especially if there's no way to use the radio without that specific car.
My issue with that analogy is that the CPU is more like the engine of a car, and people certainly do buy cars just to have a vehicle with a given engine.
When it was only the iPad with the M4, it was easier to be sympathetic to your cause, since the iPad is totally locked down and isn't a general purpose computing device since it can't run arbitrary code. But now the Mac Mini is available. It is a general purpose computing device, and you can install Firefox and Linux or whatever you want.
It doesn't meet the level of hardware vendor purity you're asking for, sure, but that's a more ideological now that there's a general purpose computer with the M4 for sale. (Just wish it were cheaper.)
And since it just went on sale today, I was highlighting that, since other readers might want to know that they can now get a computer with an M4.
And why does that matter exactly for the discussion at hand?