Intel announces first batch of second-gen “Lunar Lake” Core Ultra laptop CPUs

Another mixed year for CPU speed, but battery and graphics upgrades are welcome.

See full article...

 

[breze]

If nothing else, Apple's move kind of set a precedent which Microsoft could follow. I'm not saying that they only started shifting to ARM because Apple did, it's not like the 90s where MS R&D consisted of a subscription to MacWorld, but the fact that Apple was able to transition, and do it so quickly, clearly gave MS some bargaining power with Intel. I don't know if they ever intended to move their entire platform to ARM only, but they'd only have to hint at it to make Intel jumpy.

And I'll just add my obligatory comment that I'm still holding out for the Groom Lake processor.

Microsoft has taken so many swings at switching to ARM, it is hard to take them too seriously. Maybe at this point where their former partner is most vulnerable they can pull it off? But I bet they won’t go all in.

Microsoft isn’t Apple. They don’t have the hardware competency to copy Apple’s homework this time. They are barely managing the incredible feat of… buying chips from a different company. They won’t gain any of the vertical integration advantages that Apple does because they’ve only got half the puzzle.

 

[wrylachlan]

N3B is a superior process to N3E. N3E does not bring any performance or power efficiency improvements. It was optimized for manufacturing. If has lower device density than N3B but it is cheaper.

Nope. It’s cheaper to manufacture and 5% less dense SRAM but it is also both a performance and efficiency improvement over N3B. Approximately 5% perf and similar efficiency.

And you can see the proof in Apple’s M4 (on N3E) vs M3 (on N3B). The M4 is notably higher performing and more efficient. It’s a remarkable improvement for the approximately 6 month gap between the release of the M3 and the M4.

 

[Andrewcw]

Microsoft has taken so many swings at switching to ARM, it is hard to take them too seriously. Maybe at this point where their former partner is most vulnerable they can pull it off? But I bet they won’t go all in.

Microsoft isn’t Apple. They don’t have the hardware competency to copy Apple’s homework this time. They are barely managing the incredible feat of… buying chips from a different company. They won’t gain any of the vertical integration advantages that Apple does because they’ve only got half the puzzle.

Yeah not only they can't copy the homework. Apple's homework was way different as the teacher gave all the people homework years in advance to work on. They were then able to tell the students that didn't listen that they'd no longer be able to ride the bus to the new school.

Where Microsoft can't do the same. They have to rely on emulation to stay alive. Where Apple's culture has trained their customers to just buy new everything.

 

[Rick06]

It's a shame there's no 64GB of RAM, although this is probably due to the lack of 32GB LPDDR5 RAM chips.

Well, the same architecture but with 4 channels, 64GB of that fast LPDDR5 RAM and an improved GPU could result in some very nice applications, such as inference on local language models and gaming. Who knows, maybe also Intel will produce a "Pro" or a "Max" chip...

 

[I don't know who I am]

Microsoft has been flirting with ARM for quite some time:

https://www.theverge.com/2012/2/12/2792821/microsoft-was-running-windows-on-arm-two-years-ago
It's just that good ARM CPUs from Qualcomm just weren't there, and MS probably didn't consider it important enough to take ARM development in-house the way Apple did.

I would not be surprised at all if MS has a skunkworks creating their own processor designs. Where Intel has missed the boat is the investment in the fabs. I guess they relied too heavily on the need to maintain x86. With in-house designs being viable alternatives, and so much software being delivered via browsers, x86 compatibility is becoming less of a necessity. I don't know if Intel has an ARM license but they should license it and develop their own designs like Apple. That would make things very interesting.

 

[jtwrenn]

I judge these in a very simple way. If they are presented with a flashy background and I don't see the raw test numbers....I completely and totally ignore them.

I will wait for hands on tests from people not selling the product directly....and then I will compare those ad sellers to other sites and then still expect it to do slightly worse.

 

[adamsc]

Yeah not only they can't copy the homework. Apple's homework was way different as the teacher gave all the people homework years in advance to work on. They were then able to tell the students that didn't listen that they'd no longer be able to ride the bus to the new school.

Where Microsoft can't do the same. They have to rely on emulation to stay alive. Where Apple's culture has trained their customers to just buy new everything.

The situation is more complicated than that: Apple hardware tends to last longer, so it’s not that people are just buying newer devices. What’s different is that Apple isn’t beholden to enterprise IT departments who still dream of mainframe-style lifecycles where you only upgrade software a few times per century. Apple will tell developers that they must stop using a deprecated API no latter than two major releases from now and makes it stick, while Microsoft will hehe an entire team working on backwards compatibility mechanisms to avoid breaking someone’s Visual Basic app last compiled during the Clinton administration.

There’s some truth to Microsoft’s claims that they’re doing what customers want and avoiding antitrust claims, but it’s also true that they profit enormously from every large organization thinking that they can’t afford to stop giving Microsoft huge amounts of money every year, so they’re really not motivated to change the status quo. The people who pay the cost are really the ordinary users who have almost no influence in the matter and are just stuck with an operating system where things rarely improve and everything is slower, clunkier, more power hungry, and less secure. I don’t see this changing much barring government regulation changes or a substantial increase in the number of people switching to Mac, ChromeOS, or mobile platforms.

 

[hubick]

No Thunderbolt 5 is fail.

 

[purecarrot]

Nope. It’s cheaper to manufacture and 5% less dense SRAM but it is also both a performance and efficiency improvement over N3B. Approximately 5% perf and similar efficiency.

And you can see the proof in Apple’s M4 (on N3E) vs M3 (on N3B). The M4 is notably higher performing and more efficient. It’s a remarkable improvement for the approximately 6 month gap between the release of the M3 and the M4.

There are differences other than just the process between M3 and M4. Because of that, comparison between M3 and M4 does not directly translate to a difference between N3B and N3E.

 

[purecarrot]

The situation is more complicated than that: Apple hardware tends to last longer, so it’s not that people are just buying newer devices. What’s different is that Apple isn’t beholden to enterprise IT departments who still dream of mainframe-style lifecycles where you only upgrade software a few times per century. Apple will tell developers that they must stop using a deprecated API no latter than two major releases from now and makes it stick, while Microsoft will hehe an entire team working on backwards compatibility mechanisms to avoid breaking someone’s Visual Basic app last compiled during the Clinton administration.

There’s some truth to Microsoft’s claims that they’re doing what customers want and avoiding antitrust claims, but it’s also true that they profit enormously from every large organization thinking that they can’t afford to stop giving Microsoft huge amounts of money every year, so they’re really not motivated to change the status quo. The people who pay the cost are really the ordinary users who have almost no influence in the matter and are just stuck with an operating system where things rarely improve and everything is slower, clunkier, more power hungry, and less secure. I don’t see this changing much barring government regulation changes or a substantial increase in the number of people switching to Mac, ChromeOS, or mobile platforms.

It's not the IT departments that need backward compatibility, it's the enterprises. Lack of backward compatibility is a major reason why nobody uses Macs in enterprise environments. Backward compatibility is actually important for regular users too. That's why you see so many posts about Mac users buying cheap PCs to run legacy software because they can't do it on Macs. The fact is that macOS market share basically has not been increasing in recent years. It remains a niche OS. Most people (by far) prefer Windows.

 

[Geburtenfresser]

As much as the efficiency improvements while I'm using it, I want my next laptop to fix the jankiness I associate with Intel PCs.

I mean things like draining the battery overnight while in sleep mode, or that 1 second lag after hitting the power button before it wakes up. My phone can go to sleep and lose only 1% overnight and then turn on instantaneously when I hit the power button in the morning. I really wish my laptop could, too, it feels like such an archaic piece of technology at times.

That’s windows, not the cpu.
I have several Chromebooks with Intel CPUs and they don’t show any of the flaws associated with Windows PCs that you described

 

[Sifaka]

I want to see Intel succeed because they have been an iconic American company, but I am not convinced any company can stay truly competitive and keep the stock market happy. This being on TSMCs line feels like just another data point as the company continues its slow burn.

If you can't invest in long term success you can't stay viable long term.

 

[healthcamp]

Everyone is giving Intel a hard time for failing to keep up with TSMC when literally no other company In the world can keep up with TSMC. The Taiwanese semiconductor industry gets the pick of Taiwan’s engineering talent, and TSMC gets the pick of the pick. There are like 40 other Taiwanese semiconductor companies, none of which approach TSMC’s excellence.

It’s a bummer that TSMC doesn’t have real leading-edge competition, but it’s hard to blame any one company for failing where literally every other company (save one) has also failed despite absolutely heroic investments of money, brainpower, and time.

I’m not an Intel partisan or anything but I hope they can catch up for the sake of progress and competition. Same with Samsung and anyone else who has a real shot at approaching the lead.

 

[gijames1225]

Will be interesting to see benchmarks. Them fabbing so much of this at TSMC is pretty brutal though, and probably explains in between the lines why I never see any news about Intel's attempts to sell fab services to others.

 

[skavi]

Last graph (in the middle carousel) shows an M3, roughly equal to the new Intel chips

The same graph shows an X1E at a worse spot on the curve than last gen intel parts. Which doesn’t seem to align with what I’ve read elsewhere?

 

[gijames1225]

Everyone is giving Intel a hard time for failing to keep up with TSMC when literally no other company In the world can keep up with TSMC. The Taiwanese semiconductor industry gets the pick of Taiwan’s engineering talent, and TSMC gets the pick of the pick. There are like 40 other Taiwanese semiconductor companies, none of which approach TSMC’s excellence.

It’s a bummer that TSMC doesn’t have real leading-edge competition, but it’s hard to blame any one company for failing where literally every other company (save one) has also failed despite absolutely heroic investments of money, brainpower, and time.

I’m not an Intel partisan or anything but I hope they can catch up for the sake of progress and competition. Same with Samsung and anyone else who has a real shot at approaching the lead.

You'd have more of a point if Intel hadn't been the market leaders until a few years back. They had the brains and talent pool to keep competitive, but blew it.

 

[Boskone]

Modest CPU performance increases alongside big power efficiency and battery life improvements, much faster graphics performance, and a new neural processing engine (NPU).
So it is created for Copilot+ laptops - just what Microsoft wants.

Aside from the NPU, that honestly sounds like a pretty good package.

 

[breze]

Nationalize them.

Nationalize Intel. Nationalize GlobalFoundries. Nationalize Texas Instruments. Get enough stakes to sway board votes in TSMC and Samsung and whoever else makes ICs of any sort. Go beyond fabs and hardware in general. Nationalize Nvidia. Nationalize AMD. Nationalize Amazon and Google and MS starting from their rent-a-server subsidiaries. Nationalize the entire "defense" industry starting from Boeing. Nationalize the company formerly known as Facebook. Nationalize every single journal that thinks it's worthy to gatekeep the discoveries that allow all these companies to exist and do what they do. Do fucking ANYTHING with the very literally unfathomable sums the feds get over the course of every year other than gathering a bunch of humanoid skinwalkers and stuffing their pockets with taxes and hoping they provide somewhat decent goods and services for the public good in return. That ought to take care of "national security", yes?

Err, no? I appreciate the enthusiasm but generally we don’t nationalize industries if it can be avoided. I’d especially be worried about removing competition from the tech sector.

To compete on a level playing field, Intel probably needs well-designed subsidies or something like that.

 

[adamsc]

Everyone is giving Intel a hard time for failing to keep up with TSMC when literally no other company In the world can keep up with TSMC. The Taiwanese semiconductor industry gets the pick of Taiwan’s engineering talent, and TSMC gets the pick of the pick. There are like 40 other Taiwanese semiconductor companies, none of which approach TSMC’s excellence.

This was not the case a decade or so back: Intel had the crown for many years, before they badly floundered. Their management are rightly being criticized for absolutely incinerating the decades of lead which they had, and taking so long to recover. TSMC didn’t pass Intel until 2023, a decade past when everyone in the industry knew Intel was struggling. Their chip designers had been complacent, having relied for decades on their once-industry leading fabs to keep them ahead, and the bean counters were trying to avoid investing enough in 10nm. Meanwhile, Apple had shipped their first CPU in 2010 and was doubling performance every year or so, which meant that phones went from being slow to competitive with your laptop well before the end of the decade – and Intel’s management was AWOL playing MBA games juicing their stock price while TSMC, Apple and AMD took advantage of the opportunity to outcompete. They’re just lucky that Qualcomm was too busy screwing their customers to invest.

 

[karolus]

It's not the IT departments that need backward compatibility, it's the enterprises. Lack of backward compatibility is a major reason why nobody uses Macs in enterprise environments. Backward compatibility is actually important for regular users too. That's why you see so many posts about Mac users buying cheap PCs to run legacy software because they can't do it on Macs. The fact is that macOS market share basically has not been increasing in recent years. It remains a niche OS. Most people (by far) prefer Windows.

Would say that for regular users—outside of gaming—backwards compatibility may be much less important as time goes on. Many apps now exist as SaaS that can be run in the browser. This is even true for Microsoft’s mainline productivity apps. Even when working with web design and development, as long as the tools can be run in the CLI and on the VM, there is little need for keeping older systems around.

 

[nzeid]

Modest CPU performance increases alongside big power efficiency and battery life improvements, much faster graphics performance, and a new neural processing engine (NPU).
So it is created for Copilot+ laptops - just what Microsoft wants.

You seem to be implying that customers were better served by the previous battle to include more cores that turboed harder.

OK... Neither were they served better with shit power consumption and heat, nor are they served better now with LLM trash.

 

[breze]

You seem to be implying that customers were better served by the previous battle to include more cores that turboed harder.

I don’t care that much about customers, faster single threaded performance is cool as heck and ought to be the metric by which we judge the field.

The universe will give us as much bandwidth as we want, but we have to fight it for latency. It is a shame that chip designers seem to be taking the universe’s hits on the chin nowadays.

I think this is the real problem with Intel nowadays. They are built around charging us a premium to be our champion in the battle against the speed of light. If they are just going to make a bunch of boring little cores to try and wow us with energy efficient throughput, we might as well buy GPUs.

 

[adamsc]

Would say that for regular users—outside of gaming—backwards compatibility may be much less important as time goes on. Many apps now exist as SaaS that can be run in the browser. This is even true for Microsoft’s mainline productivity apps. Even when working with web design and development, as long as the tools can be run in the CLI and on the VM, there is little need for keeping older systems around.

Yeah, I think this is something which is easier to forget if you’ve been at this for a while. One of the big changes over the last couple decades has been that the web ate a lot of small apps, everything left has moved into an always-online world where it’s easy to ship updates, virtualization is a mainstream feature rather than an expensive separate purchase, and security means you can’t slack on updating apps, and phones have eaten the utility market. 20 years ago, I needed Windows for things like updating my Garmin or Nikon firmware or playing music on the home audio system but a lot of people no longer even have separate devices for things like that and if they do it’s more likely that they use wifi directly or have Android/iOS apps than a desktop app.

I certainly don’t think Windows is doomed or anything but I think the environment has shifted how valuable long-term backwards compatibility is for almost everyone.

 

[InvariantCapitalist]

This was not the case a decade or so back: Intel had the crown for many years, before they badly floundered. Their management are rightly being criticized for absolutely incinerating the decades of lead which they had, and taking so long to recover. TSMC didn’t pass Intel until 2023, a decade past when everyone in the industry knew Intel was struggling. Their chip designers had been complacent, having relied for decades on their once-industry leading fabs to keep them ahead, and the bean counters were trying to avoid investing enough in 10nm. Meanwhile, Apple had shipped their first CPU in 2010 and was doubling performance every year or so, which meant that phones went from being slow to competitive with your laptop well before the end of the decade – and Intel’s management was AWOL playing MBA games juicing their stock price while TSMC, Apple and AMD took advantage of the opportunity to outcompete. They’re just lucky that Qualcomm was too busy screwing their customers to invest.

No amount of subsidies can overcome the millstone of Intel's management decisions. Subsidies are for dead or dying industries, competitive industries need dynamic forward looking leadership.

 

[InvariantCapitalist]

Nationalize them.

Nationalize Intel. Nationalize GlobalFoundries. Nationalize Texas Instruments. Get enough stakes to sway C-suite decisions in TSMC and Samsung and whoever else makes ICs of any sort. Go beyond fabs and hardware in general. Nationalize Nvidia. Nationalize AMD. Nationalize Amazon and Google and MS starting from their rent-a-server subsidiaries. Nationalize the entire "defense" industry starting from Boeing. Nationalize the company formerly known as Facebook. Nationalize every single journal that thinks it's worthy to gatekeep the discoveries that allow all these companies to exist and do what they do. Do fucking ANYTHING with the very literally unfathomable sums the feds get over the course of every year other than gathering a bunch of humanoid skinwalkers and stuffing their pockets with taxes and hoping they provide somewhat decent goods and services for the public good in return. That ought to take care of "national security", yes?

I'm fine with a form of nationalization that is if your company needs subsidies or special privileges like tariffs, the government strips management of their stock options, max exec salaries are capped at no more than $1M per year and the subsidies are loans to be repaid with interest before anything can be spent on exec bonuses, dividends or stock buybacks.

 

[aleph_nought]

As much as the efficiency improvements while I'm using it, I want my next laptop to fix the jankiness I associate with Intel PCs.

I mean things like draining the battery overnight while in sleep mode, or that 1 second lag after hitting the power button before it wakes up. My phone can go to sleep and lose only 1% overnight and then turn on instantaneously when I hit the power button in the morning. I really wish my laptop could, too, it feels like such an archaic piece of technology at times.

My new Snapdragon laptop uses 1% to 2% overnight and wakes up instantly in the morning. Intel needs to fix x86 sleep states.

 

[OrangeCream]

Nationalize them.

Nationalize Intel. Nationalize GlobalFoundries. Nationalize Texas Instruments. Get enough stakes to sway C-suite decisions in TSMC and Samsung and whoever else makes ICs of any sort. Go beyond fabs and hardware in general. Nationalize Nvidia. Nationalize AMD. Nationalize Amazon and Google and MS starting from their rent-a-server subsidiaries. Nationalize the entire "defense" industry starting from Boeing. Nationalize the company formerly known as Facebook. Nationalize every single journal that thinks it's worthy to gatekeep the discoveries that allow all these companies to exist and do what they do. Do fucking ANYTHING with the very literally unfathomable sums the feds get over the course of every year other than gathering a bunch of humanoid skinwalkers and stuffing their pockets with taxes and hoping they provide somewhat decent goods and services for the public good in return. That ought to take care of "national security", yes?

Wait a minute, when do you decide to nationalize something?

For example, NVIDIA releases CUDA in 2007; is that when they should have become a national interest? Or how about when they announced the Volta/Turing architecture in 2013? Maybe when they actually released their first Tensor architecture (the aforementioned Volta/Turing) in 2018?

Or should it have been in 2014, when NVLink was announced? 2016 when it was first implemented as part of the DGX-1, an 8 GPU server configuration? Or in 2019, when they purchased Mellanox? 2020 when they released the DGX A100, which allowed them to link 6 together using InfiniBand? The Selene was composed of 280 DGX A100 nodes.

My point is pretty simple: I suspect if you nationalize too early you short circuit many of the benefits that would have made you suggest nationalization in the first place.

I think a better solution might be to restore the 35% corporate income tax bracket as well as eliminate many of the tax loss benefits. A corporation shouldn't be able to write off taxes just because they took a loss a previous year, or a future year, to eliminate/refund taxes owed.

If you make money, you pay taxes. If you take a loss, you don't pay taxes. Don't apply the loss into the future, and don't apply the loss into the past.

 

[DNA_Doc]

I've read this sentence multiple times and don't understand it. Is there an error here or am I just missing the point:

"If Intel can improve its battery life more quickly than Microsoft, and if Arm chipmakers and app developers can improve software compatibility, some of the current best arguments in favor of buying an Arm PC will go away."

I get the first part, but not the bolded part. If Arm [people] improve software compatibility, how does that make arguments in favor of buying Arm PCs go away?

 

[plympton]

Great! Can I close a windows laptop yet and put it in my laptop bag without it spinning up to 200 degrees?

+1 - I thought I was doing something wrong! My ancient X1 Carbon Gen 6 doesn't have that issue, but my 13th gen workstation just sizzles on sleep.

 

[QuarterSwede]

I'm not convinced that the problem lies with Intel - I expect Microsoft and their rubbish Modern Standby are as much or more to blame. (unless someone can confirm similar issues with other OS on same hardware).

Edit: I note a comment on p2 by Geburtenfresser to the effect that ChromeOS devices with Intel chips are fine.
I'll also add that I have some older devices that have gone through many different versions of suck on the standby front over the years (and some small stretches of OK) - and I'd have trouble blaming Intel for those changes.

x86 chips are not power friendly. I’ve got a work issued Ryzen 5 laptop and its standby is good. Didn’t charge it once over our 4-day holiday weekend for Labor Day and it still had plenty left when I plugged it in this morning. My co-workers Intel laptop running the same OS (Win 11) and on the same hardware (Thinkpad E15 gen 4) can’t make it 2 days. Of course none of that even comes close to an A-series MacBook.

 

[adamsc]

No amount of subsidies can overcome the millstone of Intel's management decisions. Subsidies are for dead or dying industries, competitive industries need dynamic forward looking leadership.

Subsidies can be better than that but they need to be designed with effective feedback loops for the things you care about. China subsidized solar production and that is probably doing more to reduce climate change than anything else because the subsidies weren’t directed to a single company whether or not they produced a good product.

For something like chips, I’d write the requirement to focus on the goal of avoiding a dependency on China, which I would oversimplified for discussion to something like “best price/performance for a 64-bit CPU with first-class Linux support as long as it’s not manufactured with a supply chain dependency on China”. That favors Intel a bit given their history but the key part would be a clear message to Gelsinger that the government wants the geopolitical goal more than x86 and if Apple/TSMC or Amazon’s Annapurna Labs/TSMC made a competitive bid the GSA would say “sounds great, we’ll take a million of them and ARM support will be mandatory on all federal procurements”.

 

[plympton]

I would not be surprised at all if MS has a skunkworks creating their own processor designs.

I think the skunkworks was them walking to Qualcomm and saying, "Hey! We'll make you most-favored player for this Copilot initiative we have". Heck, I was just looking at picking up a Snapdragon based ThinkPad after seeing some general purpose reviews.

 

[dave23]

x86 chips are not power friendly. I’ve got a work issued Ryzen 5 laptop and its standby is good. Didn’t charge it once over our 4-day holiday weekend for Labor Day and it still had plenty left when I plugged it in this morning. My co-workers Intel laptop running the same OS (Win 11) and on the same hardware (Thinkpad E15 gen 4) can’t make it 2 days. Of course none of that even comes close to an A-series MacBook.

Interesting. Never used AMD before in laptops.

 

[ChronoReverse]

My new Snapdragon laptop uses 1% to 2% overnight and wakes up instantly in the morning. Intel needs to fix x86 sleep states.

While active usage and Teams usage is far better on Snapdragon, my 7840u on Linux can do the sleep part. The problem with Sleep on Windows is Windows itself.

 

[InvariantCapitalist]

I think a better solution might be to restore the 35% corporate income tax bracket as well as eliminate many of the tax loss benefits. A corporation shouldn't be able to write off taxes just because they took a loss a previous year, or a future year, to eliminate/refund taxes owed.

If you make money, you pay taxes. If you take a loss, you don't pay taxes. Don't apply the loss into the future, and don't apply the loss into the past.

Corporate income tax is just a tax on re-investment and terrible economic policy. Its akin to taxing seedcorn so that farmers can plant less acreage when you have a growing population and need for food.

The 35% tax should be applied to dividends, realized capital gains and buybacks, which is when profits are distributed to owners. Any profits retained within the company, even if just to strengthen the balance sheet, should be tax deferred for the same reasons we defer taxes on retirement accounts. Deferral increases long term returns and increases the motivation to invest. Higher investment equals higher productivity and better paying jobs.

 

[adamsc]

My new Snapdragon laptop uses 1% to 2% overnight and wakes up instantly in the morning. Intel needs to fix x86 sleep states.

I always wonder whether this is Intel or the third-party device manufacturers, driver vendors, etc. IT departments always get flack for disabling power saving but it usually traces back to someone getting burned by blue screens, compatibility issues, etc. and saying they’ll re-enable it when Dell ships an update, which might never happen in the life of the hardware.

 

[NPPraxis]

I'm really skeptical of almost all x86 benchmarks like this that brag about battery life after seeing how AMD handled a lot of their recent claims. The general pattern I see is:

The new chips can scale down very well, allowing Intel or AMD to claim long battery life, comparable to ARM chips (Qualcomm X Elite or Apple M3). So they claim comparable to ARM chips in battery life.

The new chips can scale up very well, competing with the high end laptop ARM chips in performace. So they claim it beats Apple and Qualcomm too.

However, it can't do them both at the same time. If it's beating the ARM chips in performance by a tiny margin, it's losing terribly in battery life. If it's beating the ARM chips in battery life, it's only by dramatically scaling down performance.

Give me battery life comparison vs an M3 while at load. Which chip lasts longer while running heavy benchmarks or playing Baldur's Gate 3?

 

[breze]

x86 chips are not power friendly. I’ve got a work issued Ryzen 5 laptop and its standby is good. Didn’t charge it once over our 4-day holiday weekend for Labor Day and it still had plenty left when I plugged it in this morning. My co-workers Intel laptop running the same OS (Win 11) and on the same hardware (Thinkpad E15 gen 4) can’t make it 2 days. Of course none of that even comes close to an A-series MacBook.

Ryzen would typically be called x86, so I’m slightly confused about this anecdote (that is to say, it is x86 to the same extent that modern Intel chips are, actually they are amd64, aka x86-64, but these are all different names for the same x86 descent).

I’m also surprised if the isa has much to do with the idle characteristics, while suspended, in sleep mode or something like that. The CPU should be suspended anyway, right? It doesn’t matter what instruction set it has, it isn’t running instructions while sleeping. I wonder, since they are work issued laptops, if some annoying management software is not letting them fall asleep properly. Blame corporate IT, or maybe Microsoft, before Intel or AMD.

 

[NPPraxis]

Corporate income tax is just a tax on re-investment and terrible economic policy. Its akin to taxing seedcorn so that farmers can plant less acreage when you have a growing population and need for food.

The 35% tax should be applied to dividends, realized capital gains and buybacks, which is when profits are distributed to owners. Any profits retained within the company, even if just to strengthen the balance sheet, should be tax deferred for the same reasons we defer taxes on retirement accounts. Deferral increases long term returns and increases the motivation to invest. Higher investment equals higher productivity and better paying jobs.

Ok, I'm also an armchair econ nerd, and I generally agree with you- we can solve most of these issues with taxes by treating buybacks like an income event (so they no longer have an advantage over dividends), because that's basically what buybacks are (a way to transfer value from the business to the shareholders without triggering income tax).

However, here's a question:
Why is corporate income tax a "tax on re-investment"? Isn't it only a tax on corporate profits- i.e. if the corporation reinvests the money, it lowers it's taxable income?

In theory, it's not an efficient method for the government to raise revenue, but it would encourage reinvestment, wouldn't it? Companies like Amazon that focused on growth would never have triggered an income tax.

The main issue is more the double taxation problem (you tax 35% of the profits when the corporation makes it and then income tax the shareholders again when it gets paid out for them). The problem is right now both taxes are being dodged when corporations post low profits and then do buybacks (so it never triggers income tax to shareholders).