Ask HN: Why hasn't x86 caught up with Apple M series?
190 comments
·August 25, 2025ben-schaaf
Battery efficiency comes from a million little optimizations in the technology stack, most of which comes down to using the CPU as little as possible. As such the instruction set architecture and process node aren't usually that important when it comes to your battery life.
If you fully load the CPU and calculate how much energy a AI340 needs to perform a fixed workload and compare that to a M1 you'll probably find similar results, but that only matters for your battery life if you're doing things like blender renders, big compiles or gaming.
Take for example this battery life gaming benchmark for an M1 Air: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jYSMfRKsmOU. 2.5 hours is about what you'd expect from an x86 laptop, possibly even worse than the fw13 you're comparing here. But turn down the settings so that the M1 CPU and GPU are mostly idle, and bam you get 10+ hours.
Another example would be a ~5 year old mobile qualcomm chip. It's a worse process node than an AMD AI340, much much slower and significantly worse performance per watt, and yet it barely gets hot and sips power.
All that to say: M1 is pretty fast, but the reason the battery life is better has to do with everything other than the CPU cores. That's what AMD and Intel are missing.
> If I open too many tabs in Chrome I can feel the bottom of the laptop getting hot, open a YouTube video and the fans will often spin up.
It's a fairly common issue on Linux to be missing hardware acceleration, especially for video decoding. I've had to enable gpu video decoding on my fw16 and haven't noticed the fans on youtube.
jonwinstanley
A huge reason for the low power usage is the iPhone.
Apple spent years incrementally improving efficiency and performance of their chips for phones. Intel and AMD were more desktop based so power efficiency wasnt the goal. When Apple's chips got so good they could transition into laptops, x86 wasn't in the same ballpark.
Also the iPhone is the most lucrative product of all time (I think) and Apple poured a tonne of that money into R&D and taking the top engineers from Intel, AMD, and ARM, building one of the best silicon teams.
aurareturn
All that to say: M1 is pretty fast, but the reason the battery life is better has to do with everything other than the CPU cores. That's what AMD and Intel are missing.
Apple Silicon is 2-4x more efficient than AMD and Intel CPUs during load while also having higher top end speed.
Another thing that makes Apple laptops feel way more efficient is that they use a true big.Little design while AMD and Intel's little cores are actually designed for area efficiency and not power efficiency. In the case of Intel, they stuff as many little cores as possible to win MT benchmarks. In real world applications, the little cores are next to useless because most applications prefer a few fast cores over many slow cores.
lenkite
Hell, Apple CPU's are even optimized for Apple software GC calls like Retain/Release objects. It seems if you want optimal performance and power efficiency, you need to own both hardware and software.
Looks like general purpose CPUs are on the losing train.
Maybe Intel should invent desktop+mobile OS and design bespoke chips for those.
throwup238
> All that to say: M1 is pretty fast, but the reason the battery life is better has to do with everything other than the CPU cores. That's what AMD and Intel are missing.
A good demonstration is the Android kernel. By far the biggest difference between it and the stock Linux kernel is power management. Many subsystems down to the process scheduler are modified and tuned to improve battery life.
qcnguy
And the more relevant case for laptops is macOS, which is heavily optimized for battery life and power draw in ways that Linux just isn't, neither is Windows. A lot of the problems here can't actually be fixed by intel, amd, or anyone designing x86 laptops because getting that level of efficiency requires the ability to strongly lead the app developer community. It also requires highly competent operating system developers focusing on the issue for a very long time, and being able to co-design the operating system, firmware and hardware together. Microsoft barely cares about Windows anymore, the Linux guys only care about servers since forever, and that leaves Apple alone in the market. I doubt anything will change anytime soon.
john01dav
Power efficiency is very important to servers too, for cost instead of for battery life. But, energy is energy. Thus, I suspect that the power draw is in userland systems that are specific to desktop, like desktop environments. Thus, using a simpler desktop environment may be worthwhile.
prmoustache
> It's a fairly common issue on Linux to be missing hardware acceleration, especially for video decoding.
To be fair, usually the linux itself has hardware acceleration available but the browser vendors tend to disable gpu rendering except on controlled/known perfectly working combinations of OS/Hardware/Drivers and they have much less testing in Linux. In most case you can force enabling gpu rendering in about:config and try it out yourself and leave it unless you get recurring crashes.
mayama
I disable turbo boost in cpu on linux. Fans rarely start on the laptop and the system is generally cool. Even working on development and compilation I rarely need the extra perf. For my 10yr old laptop I cap max clock to 95% too to stop the fans from always starting. YMMV
whatevaa
Turning down the settings will get you worse experiece, especially if you turn down that they are "mostly idle". Not comparable.
sys_64738
Sounds like death by (2^10)-24) cuts for the x86 architecture.
DuckConference
They're big, expensive chips with a focus on power efficiency. AMD and Intel's chips that are on the big and expensive side tend toward being optimized for higher power ranges, so they don't compete well on efficiency, while their more power efficient chips tend toward being optimized for size/cost.
If you're willing to spend a bunch of die area (which directly translates into cost) you can get good numbers on the other two legs of the Power-Performance-Area triangle. The issue is that the market position of Apple's competitors is such that it doesn't make as much sense for them to make such big and expensive chips (particularly CPU cores) in a mobile-friendly power envelope.
aurareturn
Per core, Apple’s Performance cores are no bigger than AMD’s Zen cores. So it’s a myth that they’re only fast and efficient because they are big.
What makes Apple silicon chips big is they bolt on a fast GPU on it. If you include the die of a discrete GPU with an x86 chip, it’d be the same or bigger than M series.
You can look at Intel’s Lunar Lake as an example where it’s physically bigger than an M4 but slower in CPU, GPU, NPU and has way worse efficiency.
Another comparison is AMD Strix Halo. Despite being ~1.5x bigger than the M4 Pro, it has worse efficiency, ST performance, and GPU performance. It does have slightly more MT.
chasil
Is it not true that the instruction decoder is always active on x86, and is quite complex?
Such a decoder is vastly less sophisticated with AArch64.
That is one obvious architectural drawback for power efficiency: a legacy instruction set with variable word length, two FPUs (x87 and SSE), 16-bit compatibility with segmented memory, and hundreds of otherwise unused opcodes.
How much legacy must Apple implement? Non-kernel AArch32 and Thumb2?
wordofx
Yet when you put them side by side Intel and AMD feel so slow and sluggish in multi task scenarios while M series feels smooth. And unlike windows and Linux you don’t feel like it needs to be rebooted every few hours.
I had macOS but the whole experience is just superior than any Linux distro. And both windows and Linux are trash at battery life.
Edit: Linux users seem to have their panties in a twist.
chvid
I don't think there is a single thing you can point to. But overall Apple's hardware/software is highly optimized, closely knit, and each component is in general the best the industry has to offer. It is sold cheap as they make money on volume and an optimized supply chain.
Framework does not have the volume, it is optimized for modularity, and the software is not as optimized for the hardware.
As a general purpose computer Apple is impossible to beat and it will take a paradigm shift for that for to change (completely new platform - similar to the introduction of the smart phone). Framework has its place as a specialized device for people who enjoy flexible hardware and custom operating systems.
larodi
When one controls the OS and much of the delivery chain, it is not unthinkable to decide to through some billions of $$$ to create a chop optimized to serve exactly your needs.
So this is precisely what Apple did, and we can argue it was long time in the making. The funny part is that nobody expected x86 to make way for ARM chips, but perhaps this was a corporate bias stemming from Intel marketing, which they are arguably very good at.
john01dav
> It is sold cheap as they make money on volume and an optimized supply chain.
What about all the money that they make from abusive practices like refusing to integrate with competitors' products thus forcing you to buy their ecosystem, phoning home to run any app, high app store fees even on Mac OS, and their massive anti repair shenanigans?
chvid
Macs today are not designed to be easily repairably but instead to be lighter and otherwise better integrated - I believe that is consequence of consumer preferences and not shady business practices.
As for the services - it is a bit off topic as I believe Apple makes a profit on their macs alone ignoring their services business. But in general I have less of a problem with a subscription / fee-driven services business compared to an advertisement-based one. And as for the fee / alternative payment controversy (epic vs apple etc.) this is something that is relevant if you are a big brand that can actually market on your own / build an alternative shop infrastructure. For small time developers the marketing and payment infrastructure the apple app store offers is a bargain.
chvid
I am pretty sure it is a consequence of consumer preference. I can see it from my own behaviour - I am a power user of all things computing and it has been decades since I upgraded a harddisk.
omnimus
Macbooks are one of the heaviest laptops you can buy. I think they are doing it for the premium feel - it is extremely sturdy. I recently got some random lenovo YOGA for linux to go along side my macbook and it weighs less, is as thin and even has dedicated gpu - while having 2 user replaceable M.2 slots. It is also very sturdy but not as sturdy Macbooks.
What i am saying is that Apple could for sure fit replaceable drives without any change hit to size or weight. But their Mac strategy is price based on disk size and make repairs expensive so you buy new machine. I don't complain it is the reason why cheapest Macbook Air is the best laptop deal.
But let's stop this marketing story that it's their engineering genius not their market strategy.
dlcarrier
That's a Chrome problem, especially on extra powerful processors like Strix Halo. Apple is very strict about power consumption in the development of Safari, but Chrome is designed to make use of all unallocated resources. This works great on a desktop computer, making it faster than Safari, but the difference isn't that significant and it results in a lot of power draw on mobile platforms. Many simple web sites will peg a CPU core even when not in focus, and it really adds up with multiple tabs open.
It's made worse on the Strix Halo platform, because it's a performance first design, so there's more resource for Chrome to take advantage of.
The closest browser to Safari that works on Linux is Falkon. It's compatability is even less than Safari, so there's a lot of sites where you can't use it, but on the ones where you can, your battery usage can be an order of magnitude less.
I recommend using Thorium instead of Chrome; it's better but it's still Chromium under the hood, so it doesn't save much power. I use it on pages that refuse to work on anything other than Chromium.
Chrome doesn't let you suspend tabs, and as far as I could find there aren't any plugins to do so; it just kills the process when there aren't enough resources and reloads the page when you return to it. Linux does have the ability to suspend processes, and you can save a lot of battery life, if you suspend Chrome when you aren't using it.
I don't know of any GUI for it, although most window managers make it easy to assign a keyboard shortcut to a command. Whenever you aren't using Chrome but don't want to deal with closing it and re-opening it, run the following command (and ignore the name, it doesn't kill the process):
killall -STOP google-chrome
killall -CONT google-chrome
socalgal2
AFAICT the comparisons to safari are no longer true
https://birchtree.me/blog/everyone-says-chrome-devastates-ma...
That might be different on other platforms
NitpickLawyer
I think the GP is talking about linux specifically. On a Mac I can see that Chrome disables unused tabs (mouse over says "Inactive tab, xxx MB freed up")
noelwelsh
Like a few other comments have mentioned, AMD's Strix Halo / AI Max 380 and above is the chip family that is closest to what Apple has done with the M series. It has integrated memory and decent GPU. A few iterations of this should be comparable to the M series (and should make local LLMs very feasible, if that is your jam.)
aurareturn
On Cinebench 2025 single threaded, M4 is roughly 4x more efficient and 50% faster than Strix Halo. These numbers can be verified by googling Notebookcheck.
How many iterations to match Apple?
kangs
yes and no. i have macbook pro m4 and a zbook g1a (ai max 395+ ie strix halo)
In day to day usage the strix halo is significantly faster, and especially when large context LLM and games are used - but also typical stuff like Lightroom (gpu heavy) etc.
on the flip side the m4 battery life is significantly longer (but also the mpb is approx 1/4 heavier)
for what its worth i also have a t14 with a snapdragon X elite and while its battery is closer to a mbp, its just kinda slow and clunky.
so my best machine right now is the x86 actually!
aurareturn
yes and no. i have macbook pro m4 and a zbook g1a (ai max 395+ ie strix halo)
Here's a comparison I did between Strix Halo, M4 Pro, M4 Max: https://imgur.com/a/yvpEpKF
As you can see, Strix Halo is behind M4 Pro in performance and severely behind in efficiency. In ST, M4 Pro is 3.6x more efficient and 50% faster. It's not even close to the M4 Max.
(but also the mpb is approx 1/4 heavier)
nicolaslem
I also have a Strix Halo zbook G1A and I am quite disappointed in the idle power consumption as it hovers around 8W.
Adding to that, it is very picky about which power brick it accepts (not every 140W PD compliant works) and the one that comes with the laptop is bulky and heavy. I am used to plugging my laptop into whatever USB-C PD adapter is around, down to 20W phone chargers. Having the zbook refuse to charge on them is a big downgrade for me.
FirmwareBurner
>How many iterations to match Apple?
Until AMD can built a tailor made OS for their chips and build their own laptops.
aurareturn
Here's an M4 Max running macOS running Parallels running Windows compared to AMD's very best laptop chip:
https://browser.geekbench.com/v6/cpu/compare/13494385?baseli...
M4 Max is still faster. Note that the M4 Max is only given 14 out of 16 cores, likely reserving 2 of them for macOS.
How do you explain this when Windows has zero Apple Silicon optimizations?
rs186
> using the Framework feels like using an older Intel based Mac
Your memory served you wrong. Experience eith Intel based Macs was much worse than recent AMD chips.
mmcnl
A lot of insightful comments already, but there are two other tricks I think Apple is using: (1) the laptops can get really hot before the fans turn on audibly and (2) the fans are engineered to be super quiet. So even if they run on low RPM, you won't hear them. This makes the M-series seem even more efficient than they are.
Also, especially the MacBook Pros have really large batteries, on average larger than the competition. This increases the battery runtime.
BlindEyeHalo
The macbook air doesn't even have a fan. I don't think you could built a fan-less x86 laptop.
mkl
Sure you can. There are a bunch listed in this article: https://www.ultrabookreview.com/6520-fanless-ultrabooks/
Fanless x86 desktops are a thing too, in the form of thin clients and small PCs intended for business use. I have a few HP T630s I use as servers (I have used them as desktop PCs too, but my tab-hoarding habit makes them throttle a bit too much for my use - they'd be fine for a lot of people).
mnw21cam
Do you have a version of that web page for people who want to run Linux? That'd be particularly helpful.
chrismorgan
> I don't think you could built a fan-less x86 laptop.
Sure you can, they’re readily available on the market, though not especially common.
But even performance laptops can often be run without spinning their fans up at all. Right now, the ambient temperature where I live is around 28°, and my four-year-old Ryzen 5800HS laptop hasn’t used its fan all day, though for a lot of that time it will have been helped by a ceiling fan. But even away from a fan for the last half hour, it sits in my lap only warm, not hot. It’s easy enough to give it a load it’ll need to spin the fan up for, but you can also limit it so it will never need its fan. (In summer when the ambient temperature is 10°C higher every day, you’ll want to use its fan even when idling, and it’ll be hard to convince it not to spin them up.)
x86-64 devices that are don’t even have fans won’t ever have such powerful CPUs, and historically have always been very underpowered. Like only 60% of my 5800HS’s single-threaded benchmarking and only 20% of its multithreaded. But at under 20% of the peak power consumption.
mnw21cam
Sure, I have one sitting on my desk right now. It uses an Intel Core m3, and it's 7.5 years old, so it can't exactly be described as high performance, but it has a fantastic 3200x1800 screen and 8GB of RAM, and since I do all my number-crunching on remote servers it has been absolutely perfect. Unfortunately, the 7.5-year-old battery no longer lasts the whole day (it'll do more like 2 hours, or 1 hour running Zoom/Teams). It has a nice rigid all-metal construction and no fan. I'm looking around for a replacement but not finding much that makes sense.
mschuster91
You can, the thing is you have to build it out of a solid piece of metal. Either that's patented by Apple or it is too expensive for x86 system builders.
qcnguy
If I recall correctly Apple had to buy enormous numbers of CNC machines in order to build laptops that way. It was considered insane by the industry at the time.
ac29
One downside of Framework is they use DDR instead of LPDDR. This means you can upgrade or replace the RAM, but it also means memory is much slower and more power hungry.
Its also probably worth putting the laptop in "efficiency" mode (15W sustained, 25W boost per Framework). The difference in performance should be fairly negligible compared to balanced mode for most tasks and it will use less energy.
JoshTriplett
Hopefully Framework will move to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CAMM_(memory_module) in the future. But it'd have to become something that's widely available and readily purchased.
hnaccountme
Apple tailors their software to run optimally on their hardware. Other OSs have to work on a variety of platforms. Therefore limiting the amount of hardware specific optimizations.
pjerem
Well I don’t think so.
First, op is talking about Chrome which is not an Apple software. And I can testify that I observed the same behavior with other software which are really not optimized for macOS or even at all. Jetbrains IDEs are fast on M*.
Also, processor manufacturers are contributors of the Linux kernel and have economical interest in having Linux behave as fast as they can on their platforms if they want to sell them to datacenters.
I think it’s something else. Probably unified the memory ?
yalok
Chrome uses tons of APIs from MacOS, and all that code is very well optimized by Apple.
I remember disassembling Apple’s memcpy function on ARM64 and being amazed at how much customization they did just for that little function to be as efficient as possible for each length of a (small) memory buffer.
pm215
memcpy (and the other string routines) are some of the library functions that most benefit from heavy optimisation and tuning for specific CPUs -- they get hit a lot, and careful adjustment of the code can get major performance wins by ensuring that the full memory bandwidth of the CPU is being used (which may involve using specific load instructions, deciding whether using the simd registers is better or not, and so on). So everybody who cares about performance optimises these routines pretty carefully, regardless of toolchain/OS. For instance the glibc versions are here:
https://github.com/bminor/glibc/tree/master/sysdeps/aarch64/...
and there are five versions specialised for either specific CPU models or for available architecture features.
dagmx
This argument never passes the sniff test.
You can run Linux on a MacBook Pro and get similar power efficiency.
Or run third party apps on macOS and similarly get good efficiency.
kangs
unfortunately, contrarily to popular belief, you cannot run Linux natively on recent macbooks (m4) today.
sys_64738
Depends what "natively" means. You can virtualize Linux through several means such as Virtual Box.
danieldk
You can run Linux on a MacBook Pro and get similar power efficiency.
What? No. Asahi is spectacular for what it accomplished, but battery life is still far worse than macOS.
I am not saying that it is only software. It's everything from hardware to a gazillion optimizations in macOS.
dagmx
It’s worse at switching power states, but at a given power state it is within the ball park of macOS power use.
The things where it lags are anything that use hardware acceleration or proper lowering to the lower power states.
aurareturn
The fastest and most efficiency Windows laptop in the world is an M4 MacBook running Parallels.
yalok
How does it compare with VMWare? I’d rather not use Parallels…
edit: whoever downvoted - please explain, what's wrong with preferring VMWare? also, for me, historically (2007-2012), it's been more performant, but didn't use it lately.
aurareturn
Looks about the same between Parallels and VMWare: https://browser.geekbench.com/v6/cpu/compare/13494570?baseli...
Also, here's proof that M4 Max running Parallels is the fastest Windows laptop: https://browser.geekbench.com/v6/cpu/compare/13494385?baseli...
M4 Max is running macOS running Parallels running Windows and is only using 14 out of 16 possible cores and it's still faster than AMD's very best laptop chip.
mmcnl
No, it's not, it's absolutely the hardware. The vertical integration surely doesn't hurt, but third-party software runs very fast and efficient on M-series too, including Asahi Linux.
dancek
Does Asahi Linux now run efficiently? I tried it on M1 about two years ago. Battery life was maybe 30% of what you get on macOS.
PaulKeeble
I tend to think its putting the memory on the package. Putting the memory on the package has given the M1 over 400GB/s which is a good 4x that on a usual dual channel x64 CPU and the latency is half that of going out to a DRAM slot. That is drastic and I remember when the northbrige was first folded into the CPU by AMD with the Athlon and it had a similarly big improvements in performance. It also reduces power consumption a lot.
The cost is flexibility and I think for now they don't want to move to fixed RAM configurations. The X3D approach from AMD gets a good bunch of the benefits by just putting lots of cache on board.
Apple got a lot of performance out of not a lot of watts.
One other possibility on power saving is the way Apple ramps the clockspeed. Its quite slow to increase from its 1Ghz idle to 3.2Ghz, about 100ms and it doesn't even start for 40ms. With tiny little bursts of activity like web browsing and such this slow transition likely saves a lot of power at a cost of absolute responsiveness.
Tuna-Fish
> and the latency is half that of going out to a DRAM slot.
No, it's not. DRAM latency on Apple Silicon is significantly higher than on the desktop, mainly because they use LPDDR which has higher latencies.
Remnant44
I was going to mention this as well.
Source: chipsandcheese.com memory latency graphs
RachelF
A small reason for less power consumption with on die RAM is that you don't need active termination, which does use a few watts of power. It isn't the main reason that the Macs use less power, though.
userbinator
this slow transition likely saves a lot of power at a cost of absolute responsiveness.
Not necessarily. Running longer at a slower speed may consume more energy overall, which is why "race to sleep" is a thing. Ideally the clock would be completely stopped most of the time. I suspect it's just because Apple are more familiar with their own SoC design and have optimised the frequency control to work with their software.
aurareturn
Memory bandwidth is not what makes the CPU fast and efficiency. The CPU doesn’t even have access to the full Apple Silicon bandwidth.
On package memory increases efficiency, not speed.
However, most of the speed and efficiency advantages are in the design.
daemonologist
I think this is partially down to Framework being a very small and new company that doesn't have the resources to make the best use of every last coulomb, rather than an inherent deficiency of x86. The larger companies like Asus and Lenovo are able to build more efficient laptops (at least under Windows), while Apple (having very few product SKUs and full vertical integration) can push things even further.
notebookcheck.com does pretty comprehensive battery and power efficiency testing - not of every single device, but they usually include a pretty good sample of the popular options.
nextos
Framework is a bit behind the others in terms of cooling, apparently due to compromises needed to achieve modularity. However, a well-tuned Ryzen U in the latest ThinkPads is not that far from M chips in terms of computing power per Watt according to some benchmarks.
Most Linux distributions are not well tuned, because this is too device-specific. Spending a few minutes writing custom udev rules, with the aid of powertop, can reduce heat and power usage dramatically. Another factor is Safari, which is significantly more efficient than Firefox and Chromium. To counter that, using a barebones setup with few running services can get you quite far. I can get more than 10 hours of battery from a recent ThinkPad.
quijoteuniv
+1 on powertop, i have use it successfully for tunning old macs that I have upcycled with Linux and difference is day & night.
danieldk
powertop helps a lot, I went from 3-4 hours to 6-7 hours on a ThinkPad. That said, it's not something you would want to bother a regular user with. E.g. enabling powertop optimizations will enable USB autosuspend, this will add a delay every darn time you didn't touch your USB keyboard or mouse for a second. So, you end up writing udev rules that excludes certain HID devices (or using different settings for when a laptop is on power or not), etc.
These are the kinds of optimizations that macOS does out of the box and you cannot expect most Linux users to do (which is one of the reasons battery life is so bad on Linux out-of-the-box).
out_of_protocol
On efficiency side, there's big difference on OS department. Recently released handheld Lenovo Go S has both SteamOS (which is Arch btw) and Windows11 versions, allowing to directly compare efficiency of a AMD's Z1E chip under load with limited TDP. And the difference is huge, with SteamOS fps is significantly higher and and the same time battery lasts a lot more.
Windows does a lot of useless crap in the background that kills battery and slows down user-launched software
Hi,
My daily workhorse is a M1 Pro that I purchased on release date, It has been one of the best tech purchases I have made, even now it really deals with anything I throw at it. My daily work load is regularly having a Android emulator, iOS simulator and a number of Dockers containers running simultaneously and I never hear the fans, battery life has taken a bit of a hit but it is still very respectable.
I wanted a new personal laptop, and I was debating between a MacBook Air or going for a Framework 13 with Linux. I wanted to lean into learning something new so went with the Framework and I must admit I am regretting it a bit.
The M1 was released back in 2020 and I bought the Ryzen AI 340 which is one of the newest 2025 chips from AMD, so AMD has 5 years of extra development and I had expected them to get close to the M1 in terms of battery efficiency and thermals.
The Ryzen is using a TSMC N4P process compared to the older N5 process, I managed to find a TSMC press release showing the performance/efficiency gains from the newer process: “When compared to N5, N4P offers users a reported +11% performance boost or a 22% reduction in power consumption. Beyond that, N4P can offer users a 6% increase in transistor density over N5”
I am sorely disappointed, using the Framework feels like using an older Intel based Mac. If I open too many tabs in Chrome I can feel the bottom of the laptop getting hot, open a YouTube video and the fans will often spin up.
Why haven’t AMD/Intel been able to catch up? Is x86 just not able to keep up with the ARM architecture? When can we expect a x86 laptop chip to match the M1 in efficiency/thermals?!
To be fair I haven’t tried Windows on the Framework yet it might be my Linux setup being inefficient.
Cheers, Stephen