No, the cursor just uses an overlay plane, and mobile architectures usually have far more planes (sometimes even an arbitrarily configurable amount), and more flexible hardware compositioning overall than desktop GPUs for efficiency reasons.

EDIT: Also note that there is nothing new with the Neo here, as all Macs since the M1 have used the same chip architecture as the iPhone.

Desktop GPU designs did not focus on tiny efficiency gains, and often only has a primary plane, a single overlay plane (for e.g., a video), and a dedicated cursor plane. Some even have to share a single overlay plane between all connected displays. It's a recent thing for desktop GPUs to get more flexible in this area, in part to improve laptop battery life in the cases where the laptop is almost entirely idle.

(For those unaware, a "plane" here is the entity in the display controller you configure to show a rendered graphics buffer, in a particular location and with particular transforms. You commonly have one plane that just covers the whole screen, and then sometimes put dynamic content on top in other planes so you can avoid having to redraw the main buffer when smaller bits of it change, like a video player or cursor. You could also e.g., scroll by rendering an entire document in advance and then move the plane around to reveal parts of it.)

> Desktop GPU designs did not focus on tiny efficiency gains

I'm not sure they're all that tiny if you can squeeze out 70% of top end performance for 25% of the power draw :)

I think the implication is they focussed on the huge efficiency gains, and didn't focus on the small ones?

At least for Nvidia and AMD desktop GPUs/cards, the priorities are:

#1 (by far) "can it play [hot game of the moment] in 4K?"

#2 (maybe) "is the fan noisy in desktop mode?"

#3 (for nerds) "can I run LLMs on it?"

I don't think top efficiency in desktop mode is on anyone's list, and even if it were, it would be hard to come up with a design that uses hundreds of watts when running top-tier games or LLMs, but also uses as little as possible when idle?

No, rather that they focused on peak performance, i.e., "churn out the most raw throughput at 400W+", rather than "get as close as possible to 0W when idle or in common uses".

Very different metrics - the former is about optimizing your architecture for pushing the most operations, the latter is about being able to power as many things off as possible.

TL;DR: Low power draw for laptops and phones is about who can reduce to the lowest performance, with the most hardware turned completely off while still just barely performing the task at hand. Completely different ballgame.

Peak performance happens at peak power draw and is a matter of having as much hardware as possible pushing as many operations as possible at any given point without spontaneously combusting. Those who have the most advanced manufacturing process, or architecture with the most execution units and best able to keep all units busy wins.

Peak power efficiency is about being able to turn as much hardware off as possible, and having lower quiescent current ("leakage power"), with bigger, beefier chips naturally having higher quiescent currents.

What is talked about here is about gating hardware such that you can shave off milliwatts or microwatts when the system is completely idle, by taking tasks that otherwise use slightly larger blocks that would have to remain on and moving them to smaller, more dedicated blocks. For example, being able to play a video with most render capabilities powered down because the display server can take the output of a hardware video decoder block and feed it straight into a display controller plane.

I meant peak performance vs peak performance though. An M1 Ultra uses 25% of the energy of an RTX3090 but gets 70% of the FPS. And in synthetic tests the M1 Ultra can get as close as 95% (!).

Nvidia (and AMD and Intel) just suck at efficiency. There is no excuse for such a performance-per-watt delta. The same is true in CPU land.

Once the first ARM Steam Deck launches gamers will realize they've been had for a decade.

Something is being misunderstood, here, it’s not an iPhone crammed into a laptop in a way that requires add’l software work. A simple analogy that fits is its a MacBook with cheaper parts and a M0 series chip.

That's not quite true, as every SoC requries quite significant software bringup for an OS that makes other software engineering tasks seem miniscule in comparison - macOS and iOS just share enough common code that it's not as big of a deal for Apple.

Also not sure why you'd label it as "M0", as trivially beats the M1 on several metrics.