Benchmarks Confirm Intel's Latest Core i9 Chip Outperforms Apple's M1 Max With Several Caveats

[Haiku_Oezu]

Newer more power hungry chip performs better, okay.

In all seriousness good on Intel for taking this seriously and actually working on a new architecture.
They’re hiring the right people and going in the right direction, douchey marketing aside.

I’m still not convinced x86 is not a dead end, but I understand why the PC market as a whole can’t afford to change radically like that.

 

[Trusteft]

For me Apple related sites and youtubers should (talking about this comparison) focus not just on the potential battery life, but the actual power consumption and thermals (in part thanks to the lower power consumption). Not doing that feels...well let's just say not very smart.
If I had the money to buy a new system now and I was between the two CPUs, I wouldn't care about battery life that much, but I would care which of the two consumes more power and has lower thermals which will help with the overall longevity of the system and probably stability too.
And before anyone from certain countries with very low electricity costs, yes there are many countries out there which have much higher cost for electricity and when you add up everything, it makes a difference.

 

[Idec50]

What is up with this headline? That's not a caveat. That's the whole enchilada.

 

[Chrjy]

caveats: baked sausage in my pants, hearing damage and children getting blown across the room.

I've been a MR member for a fair while but this has to be one of the funniest comments I've ever read! "Children being blown across the room" - Brilliant ?

 

[Idec50]

I've been a MR member for a fair while but this has to be one of the funniest comments I've ever read! "Children being blown across the room" - Brilliant ?

Seems like caveats of getting older too.

 

[Idec50]

I made a duplicate comment.

 

[nikaru]

Raider GE 76 performance curve is pretty stable, according to benchmarks.
GE is not a desktop, it is a gaming laptop.
M2 will compete against 13 gen (and zen4). Not sure it will be the winner.
Apple is not "years ahead of Intel". TSMC is. Now Intel works with them too...

Intel chips have other advantages besides performance and these should not be neglected.

PS: I agree that as laptop, MBPs are still potentially better (once the software issues on macs get sorted out).

The performance curve of Raider GE 76 may be stable new out of the box, but over the next few months the fans would become less and less effective as dust accumulates in the heating system. The lack of efficiency of the chip makes the fans work almost 99% of the time. Thermal throttling will begin sooner or later even if it is not present at first. The thermal efficiency of M1 allows the fans to kick in only in very limited situations which in a long term would benefit the performance of the machine and avoid expensive repairs and maintenance. 100 watts is just too much for a laptop size computer. The fact that Intel's chips only have 4% better performance while consuming 150% more energy speaks for itself. I agree that TSMC fab is what allows Apple to manufacture its architecture and achieve what the M1 is achieving in terms of power efficiency and performance, but the architecture itself and Apple's optimization also play a big part. In order for Intel to catch up with M1, they should be able to reduce by 50% the power consumption of their chips while maintain the overall performance.

 

[tsd]

Awesome game is on, some one finally work up the intel people. Go apple and go Amd. We the consumers only win now.

Yes!! Exactly what I thought. It takes me back to the chip wars of the last 90s, and how it resulted in faster and better products for us. ??

 

[the8thark]

Most of the outlets reporting this are claiming it is all margin of error differences. Not enough to be clearly definitive. Despite this, it does seem the intel is slightly faster. However faster is not always better. M1 gets a lot more done because it is an SoC, not just a CPU.

The future is SoC that is efficiency first and powerful second. Intel's push for CPU's only that are all speed and power only with all the associated heat and noise drawbacks are not the future and will be left behind.

 

[the8thark]

The Alder Lake chips are hugely impressive.

Anyone that claimed Intel were "dead/doomed/irrelevant" couldn't be more wrong. Intel are very firmly back in the game with their desktop & mobile chips.

Yes back in the game, that is correct. Just the wrong game. The inefficient noise and heat pollution game is not going to be around forever.

 

[the8thark]

apples and oranges.

apple has all of the efficient battery life.
intel has all of the games.

tote an intel gaming notebook with an iPad/M1 Air to win.

thats what it will come down to in the near future.

Or a Apple Silicon Mac and your favourite gaming console.

 

[Steve121178]

Yes!! Exactly what I thought. It takes me back to the chip wars of the last 90s, and how it resulted in faster and better products for us. ??

All well and good, but CPU's have been more than good enough for years. It's the crappy software that lets everything down.

Windows has been a disaster for quite some time and macOS hasn't been anything to write home about for years either.

Then you have badly optimised apps smashing CPU's and resources purely because the developers are not very competent/lazy.

 

[4743913]

Or a Apple Silicon Mac and your favourite gaming console.

do you tote your gaming console with you? unless its a switch, it probably looks funny.

in all of these discussions I am speaking notebooks. not home computers.

I do tote an Anbernic RG351V with me and thats as good as any retro console

 

[cmaier]

I'm not a PC fanboy, I am a Mac user.

But I can also acknowledge when Intel release something good.

When did that happen?

 

[the8thark]

do you tote your gaming console with you? unless its a switch, it probably looks funny.

in all of these discussions I am speaking notebooks. not home computers.

I do tote an Anbernic RG351V with me.

Of cause we are talking about portable game consoles. Just like you are talking portable notebook computers. So the non (easily) portable game consoles are outside the scope of this discussion.
Switch is not the only portable game console out there. There have been a ton in the past. Also the Steam Deck soon and add in FPGA options like Kevin Horton's Analogue Pocket.

 

[magbarn]

Yep. I have an M1 Air and Lenovo Legion w/a 3070. It's blazing and amazing with games/crypto, but will literally heat a 600 square foot room to tropical levels, not to mention the tinnitus (lol) causing fans. The wife banned me using it in the bed due to the fan noise. ?

Stop mining with it. Run it in quiet mode. My L7 with 3080 is decently quiet for a gaming laptop. Even my M1Max 16's fans get audible when playing FFXIV which is not an intensive game.

 

[svish]

Battery life will definitely be affected due to higher power requirement. Also future M chips will be more powerful.

 

[Dragon M.]

Your use case is the only one that matters yes. i see now that your point is the be all and end all. Jeez. The machine has the OPTION to run portably from a battery. See that word in bold type??? You have the OPTION to do X on your X core whatever. You might not always be in that predicament. Man. Some people…….

Haha, no.

It’s the use case these laptops were engineered for.

My use case just happens to match what the tool was designed for.

You also conveniently left out heat in your diatribe, which I mentioned, that causes thermal throttling and could very well make the processing slower over time versus a more efficient chip.

No need for the childish sarcasm. Although I don’t expect any different from amateur contrarians on an Apple forum. ? But to be completely honest, I dont *really* care what you think. I just responded to your initial comment because you were being condescending. Since it seems to be the norm for you, I’ll probably disengage now.

 

[H2SO4]

Haha, no.

It’s the use case these laptops were engineered for.

My use case just happens to match what the tool was designed for.

You also conveniently left out heat in your diatribe, which I mentioned, that causes thermal throttling and could very well make the processing slower over time versus a more efficient chip.

No need for the childish sarcasm. Although I don’t expect any different from amateur contrarians on an Apple forum. ? But to be completely honest, I dont *really* care what you think. I just responded to your initial comment because you were being condescending. Since it seems to be the norm for you, I’ll probably disengage now.

Haha, no.

Laptops are engineered for pretty much all use cases, that's why you can plug them in and use them at the same time pretty much wherever you like.

They are optimised for mobile use.

If you don't really care, then don't take the time to answer. Your disingenuousness is showing through.

 

[polaris20]

That is not the whole story. It is 4% faster in synthetic benchmarks but it will be a lot, lot faster than the M1 Max in any jobs that is not optimized for Apple's architecture. If you are not in content creation that's most jobs out there.

Conversely, stuff optimized for Apple's architecture will run much faster on M1/M1 Pro/M1 Max. Otherwise known as everyone's favorite game, "CPU Leapfrog".

 

[Bubble99]

250% more power draw for 4% more speed. Tough trade to make.

Would I be happy if I was Intel CEO? No , I would be crying for days if not for months.

And only three solution come to mind why Intel is falling behind really bad.

One, Intel had a major monopoly and did not care to when AMD ryzen came out because of the disaster of AMD bulldozer. Where Intel it did not have to spend the money on researching and development because of disaster of AMD bulldozer.

Or two, Moore's law is dead or about to be dead soon. And to quantum computing, cloud server farms or optical computing take over in the future.

Or three, X86 is not greet and was only greet because of no other competition like ARM.

 

[Unregistered 4U]

I was just thinking, I think there may be one big disadvantage Intel has versus processors like the Apple Silicon series. When a developer writes code for the M1, it gets compiled and that instruction is executed against the hardware designed to execute it. When writing code for an Intel chip, it gets compiled but, on the chip, it first goes through a decoder (which takes up a significant portion of the CPU), which deals with converting all the variable length instructions into Intel microcode, and THEN gets run against against the hardware designed to execute it. This is a complex step that, unless there are big Intel design changes, will always be required regardless of how small their die gets.

Now, I feel it’s probably more of an Apple/Orange thing (I’m thinking) than Apples to Apples. BUT thinking of it that way, since every instruction has to go through more work by the CPU to get executed, it’s not very surprising that similar levels of performance would require more power from an Intel processor. Not only now, but into the future.

 

[Bubble99]

Haha, no.

It’s the use case these laptops were engineered for.

My use case just happens to match what the tool was designed for.

You also conveniently left out heat in your diatribe, which I mentioned, that causes thermal throttling and could very well make the processing slower over time versus a more efficient chip.

No need for the childish sarcasm. Although I don’t expect any different from amateur contrarians on an Apple forum. ? But to be completely honest, I dont *really* care what you think. I just responded to your initial comment because you were being condescending. Since it seems to be the norm for you, I’ll probably disengage now.

It is gaming laptop not an office laptop or netbook. No one buying these laptops think they are going to get 8 hour batter life.

The gaming laptops are known for terrible battery life. And are big and heavy not small and thin like the netbooks. It MacBook air or iPad with all day battery and no fan and no heat. It is for the gamers and people who want to do video editing.

 

[4743913]

Of cause we are talking about portable game consoles. Just like you are talking portable notebook computers. So the non (easily) portable game consoles are outside the scope of this discussion.
Switch is not the only portable game console out there. There have been a ton in the past. Also the Steam Deck soon and add in FPGA options like Kevin Horton's Analogue Pocket.

I have a MiST but I don't take it anywhere. I thought about the pocket, but the RG351v is more in line with what I wanted. Half the price and emul focused (and it actually exists right now). I got the faux woodgrain one.

 

[huge_apple_fangirl]

It is both. In the end, the iPhone chip (A14) has the best battery life out of all other 5nm ARM chips you find in Android smartphones. So the iPhone engineers deserve all the credits of what we are seeing with the M1 and M1 Max.

Other ARM chips like Snapdragon and Exynos are made on Samsung 5nm, which is behind TSMC 5nm that Apple uses. I think MediaTek uses TSMC 7 or 6nm, so they are also behind. All things being equal. Apple’s chips should be the most efficient. But, yes Apple has done an amazing job.