With the new WWDC coming out, Apple boasts about its performance using applications like video editing, encoding, etc. However, I keep hearing that despite the “power” it has, macs are not good for gaming (I know the Apple silicon processors aren’t just a CPU but my point still stands).
Why is this the case? Even with CPUs, I see that some are marketed as doing different things, like the AMD Ryzen X3D line for gaming, versus others that are better for productivity tasks. Shouldn’t a good CPU be able to do both things? What makes them different?
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Think of a CPU as a freeway. You can increase throughout in two ways on a freeway, you can increase the number of lanes thus increasing the amount of cars that can pass a given point at once. And second you can increase the speed limit letting cars travel faster.
For CPUs the “lanes” in the above analogy are cores and threads. My desktop CPU has 16 cores and 32 threads, my laptop only has 8 cores and 16 threads. So my desktop cpu has 2x the “lanes” that my laptop has. The “speed limit” in this analog is the frequency at which the CPU functions. Today some of the slower CPUs run around 4ghz and can go as fast as 5.5-6ghz.
Video editing, 3D rendering, and tasks like that are very easy to split up and give different tasks to different “lanes” to speed things up. Think almost like baking cookies, one person can grab each ingredient, measure it, add or to the mix all sequentially one step after the next. Or you could have 8 people all grab an ingredient and measure their ingredient and essentially simultaneously dump all their ingredients at once which would go faster. So for video editing a computer can delegate different tasks to different “lanes” on the CPU and merge the result at the end. So for video editing programs tend to benefit from more cores on the CPU than they do from an increased speed limit on the CPU so a CPU with a reduced speed limit but increased lanes can chew through a video much quicker
Video games don’t leverage multi-threaded (multiple lanes calculating simultaneously) and historically are very single threaded applications. So you could have a CPU with dozens of cores (“lanes”) and it doesn’t benefit from that because all the work a video game does stays in one lane at a time, hence video games would benefit from an increased speed limit so that more data can get through that one lane quicker.
Back to my desktop vs my laptop. There’s software to measure precisely how fast a CPU can perform a given task. My desktop with 16 cores absolutely crushes my laptop in multi-threaded work, while my laptop has reduced core count it has a faster “speed limit” on the CPU and actually barely beats out my desktop CPU for single threaded work.
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