I do wonder if PC desktops will eventually move to a similar design. I have a 7800x3d on my desktop, and the thing is a beast but between it and the 3090 I basically have a space heater in my room
A game I play with friends introduced a Mac version. I thought it would be great to use my Apple Silicon MacBook Pro for some quiet, low-power gaming.
The frame rate wasn’t even close to my desktop (which is less powerful than yours). I switched back to the PC.
Last time I looked, the energy efficiency of nVidia GPUs in the lower TDP regions wasn’t actually that different from Apple’s hardware. The main difference is that Apple hardware isn’t scaled up to the level of big nVidia GPUs.
I sincerely believe that the market for desktop PCs is completely coopted by the gaming machines. They do not care one whit about machine size or energy efficiency, with only one concern in mind: bare performance. This means they buy ginormous machines, incredibly inefficient CPUs and GPUs, with cavernous internals to chuck heat out with no care for decibels.
But they spend voriously. And so the desktop PC market is theirs and theirs alone.
Desktop PCs have become the Big Block V8 Muscle Cars of the computing world. Inefficient dinosaur technology that you pour gasoline through and the output is heat and massive raw power.
Desktops are actually pickup trucks. Very powerful and capable, capable of everyday tasks, but less efficient at them. Unbeatable at their specialty, though.
Yeah. It's been the case for a while now that if someone just wants a general computer, they buy a laptop (even commonly a mac).
That's why the default advice if you're looking for 'value' is to buy a gaming console to complement your laptop. Both will excel at their separate roles for a decade without requiring much in the way of upgrades.
The desktop pc market these days is a luxury 'prosumer' market that doesn't really care about value as much. It feels like we're going back to the late 90's, early 2000's.
The price of a high end gaming pc (7800x3d and 4080) is around 2k USD. That's comparable to the MacBook Pro.
Yeah sure, if you start buying unnecessary luxury cases, fans and custom water loops it can jump up high, but that's more for clueless rich kids or enthusiasts. So I wouldn't place pc gaming as an expensive hobby today, especially considering Nvidia money grubbing practices that won't stay forever.
It would make sense, but it depends heavily on Windows / Linux support, compatibility with nvidia / amd graphics cards, and exclusivity contracts with Intel / AMD. Apple is not likely to make their chips available to OEMs at any rate, and I haven't heard of any 4th party working on a powerful desktop ARM based CPU in recent years.
I just bought a Beelink SER9 mini pc, about the same size as the Mac Mini. It's got the ridiculously named AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 processor, a laptop CPU that is decently fast for an X64 chip (2634/12927 Geekbench 6 scores) but isn't really competition for the M4. The GPU isn't up to desktop performance levels either but it does have a USB4 port capable of running eGPUs.
It would be nice. Similarly have a 5950X/3080Ti tower and it’s a great machine, but if it were an option for it to be as small and low-noise as the new Mini (or even the previous mini or Studio), I’d happily take it.
For what it is worth, I'm running that with open loop water cooling. If your chassis has the space for it, my rig won't even need to turn on fans for large amounts of the day. (Loop was sized for a threadripper, which were not really around for home builders) Size is an issue, however :)
