Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
Benchmarks Confirm Intel's Latest Core i9 Chip Outperforms Apple's M1 Max With Several Caveats
- Thread starter MacRumors
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
Oh Scalderlake how toasty you are? Intel is at it again with even more shenanigans. I get that people who use Intel chips and pay a ton of money for their gaming rig, ultra portable, creative machine, etc and have enjoyed pretty much unquestioned dominance for years. They are now facing evidence that contradicts their paradigm.
What is this constant need to brag about being the fastest cpu? It is getting a bit adolescent and all of the people here going on and on why Intel is better than Apple. Who cares about gaming for a second. Gaming machines are great but they are only for a very small use case. I have had a lot of gaming laptops over the years and I love the raw power but do I want to lug the thing around and have to look around for a wall socket all the time?
I was wondering what Intel was doing with the Big Little architecture other than it is a buzz word for Android users? A lot of people said it was to increase efficiency and I said right from the start that I didn't think that was it. Intel was looking to put as much performance as they could in the thermal constraints they had to work with. They kney if they used 10 P cores they would melt down the Earth so they mixed cores with lower thermal cores with high performance and from these benchmarks from a Gaming Laptop that isn't currently available people are claiming Intel is winning again?? All Intel wanted to do is beat or meet benchmarks at all costs. They did it and now they can market a product that will only get the claimed performance under very ideal conditions.
I wish Intel would have taken a different tack since they clearly were not going to win here. Maybe efficiency and performance should have been considered? Seems like Intel is where AMD was at during the Turian days where you could fry chicken on your laptop but it was fast and burned through a battery but it was fast.......
I will say I do think it is remarkable they can get these kind of benchmarks out of their process 7 and for the desktop these are going to be great chips. It is in the mobile space that I am more talking about when I say scalderlake.
Where are my marshmallows at? I need to get Scalderlake and start roasting!!
What is this constant need to brag about being the fastest cpu? It is getting a bit adolescent and all of the people here going on and on why Intel is better than Apple. Who cares about gaming for a second. Gaming machines are great but they are only for a very small use case. I have had a lot of gaming laptops over the years and I love the raw power but do I want to lug the thing around and have to look around for a wall socket all the time?
I was wondering what Intel was doing with the Big Little architecture other than it is a buzz word for Android users? A lot of people said it was to increase efficiency and I said right from the start that I didn't think that was it. Intel was looking to put as much performance as they could in the thermal constraints they had to work with. They kney if they used 10 P cores they would melt down the Earth so they mixed cores with lower thermal cores with high performance and from these benchmarks from a Gaming Laptop that isn't currently available people are claiming Intel is winning again?? All Intel wanted to do is beat or meet benchmarks at all costs. They did it and now they can market a product that will only get the claimed performance under very ideal conditions.
I wish Intel would have taken a different tack since they clearly were not going to win here. Maybe efficiency and performance should have been considered? Seems like Intel is where AMD was at during the Turian days where you could fry chicken on your laptop but it was fast and burned through a battery but it was fast.......
I will say I do think it is remarkable they can get these kind of benchmarks out of their process 7 and for the desktop these are going to be great chips. It is in the mobile space that I am more talking about when I say scalderlake.
Where are my marshmallows at? I need to get Scalderlake and start roasting!!
The only thing I’ve seen related to this (and I haven’t been able to find the article again) is that the architectural level licensees CAN add undocumented extensions but ONLY as long as they still fully 100% support the ISA. The article was reporting that ARM had recently made the change and they were rumoring is that it was for Apple.
EDIT:
So, I didn’t find the original article, but I found information on ARM’s site (from a few years ago which is when I think I’d read the other article) that defines “ARM custom instructions”. This is, according to the PR, “enabling SoC designers to add their own instructions for specific embedded and IoT applications without risk of software fragmentation.”
Arm Enables Custom Instructions for Embedded CPUs
Arm Custom Instructions enable partners designing SoCs to differentiate through optimization for specific embedded and IoT applications. Architected to support intelligent and rapid development of fully integrated custom CPU instructions without software fragmentation.
www.arm.com
So, not necessarily forking willy-nilly, but there’s certainly the capability to add customer specific instructions while still staying compatible with the ARM ISA.
Last edited:
They’ll still cap it. They’re not in the “throw power at it” race anymore. The only thing they have to be is faster than the previous Mac. And, if they can accomplish that with 3.2, they’ll do it with 3.2.
Remarkable how that level of performance is NOT pro just because there’s an Apple logo on the box
I guess that means that Intel only has one pro laptop chip and all the rest (since they’re more than 4% slower) are not pro.
no idea if any of that is true, but it is unlikely that any new rules arm makes would apply to apple, who likely has an ironclad license that lets them do more or less what they want - actually paying to create the company likely gave Apple some perks.
So a power hungry freight train that probably won’t make it over lunch in a coffee shop without charger. Sign me up.
If only they could design chips that don’t need fans that sound like jet engines.
Can't wait to see Intel's asking price on this i9 Max. I can see an entire M1 max laptop being a bargain by comparison.
Apple doesn’t care about the Intel anymore. They’ve committed to the new processor and will stick with it for 20 years until someone else comes out with something better. They did that with PowerPC as well. The Power 6-8 chips were faster than Intel but they didn’t care nor were they going to inform their install base that something was better than their chip decision.
Additionally, as I was searching for the other thing, I found that it plus ARM Flexible Access are rumored to have been implemented in order to head off RISC-V.
Also, MSI laptop's display has 360 Hz refresh rate vs Mac's 120 Hz. It's quite possible that at 360 Hz (and 17" screen) Mac would consume more power than MSI but we will never know because Apple is not going to give you a laptop with such screen (at least not in our life time).
It's not about Apple, it's about the consumers. They may not care about what Apple thinks if they are not getting what they need.
Last edited:
This shows the folly of relying on a single metric to assess a CPU, or really any product.
Is performance the be-all and end-all? In that case, liquid cooled and overclocked Threadripper 3990X wins. Alder Lake is pathetic, as is Apple Silicon.
Is it performance per watt? Or performance per dollar? Either way, the winner will be something equally stupid.
I think performance, performance/watt and performance/dollar need to ALL be considered. Intel wins the first (narrowly), Apple dominates the second, and the breakdown of the third is unfortunately far too difficult to assess, as Apple don't share cost breakdowns.
Also, I get the strong impression that Alder Lake is the culmination of every single tech and optimisation that Intel had at the ready, thrown together as quickly as they could (a couple of years I guess), and pushed to its absolute limit at the last minute to snatch the performance crown no matter what. Knee-jerk panic reaction after the successes of Ryzen and Apple moving in-house. It's far too suspicious to me that after a decade of 5-10% Intel CPU annual improvements, they drop this now. I think they've been holding back due to their monopoly, and now AL is all of Intel's chips on the table.
I think the issues with AVX-512 and overclockability of non-K chips suggests AL development was rushed.
To me, that suggests Raptor Lake and Meteor Lake won't be all that impressive. With AL's high core count and very high power draw, I think Intel have backed themselves into a corner.
Is performance the be-all and end-all? In that case, liquid cooled and overclocked Threadripper 3990X wins. Alder Lake is pathetic, as is Apple Silicon.
Is it performance per watt? Or performance per dollar? Either way, the winner will be something equally stupid.
I think performance, performance/watt and performance/dollar need to ALL be considered. Intel wins the first (narrowly), Apple dominates the second, and the breakdown of the third is unfortunately far too difficult to assess, as Apple don't share cost breakdowns.
Also, I get the strong impression that Alder Lake is the culmination of every single tech and optimisation that Intel had at the ready, thrown together as quickly as they could (a couple of years I guess), and pushed to its absolute limit at the last minute to snatch the performance crown no matter what. Knee-jerk panic reaction after the successes of Ryzen and Apple moving in-house. It's far too suspicious to me that after a decade of 5-10% Intel CPU annual improvements, they drop this now. I think they've been holding back due to their monopoly, and now AL is all of Intel's chips on the table.
I think the issues with AVX-512 and overclockability of non-K chips suggests AL development was rushed.
To me, that suggests Raptor Lake and Meteor Lake won't be all that impressive. With AL's high core count and very high power draw, I think Intel have backed themselves into a corner.
I love this competition. At the end of the day, all companies will be forced to push their limits to new frontiers to catch up with, and outperform Apple on multiple fronts, with performance, efficiency, design, and price being the key areas.
THE WINNER IS - THE CONSUMERS.
Funny enough, the individual staffers working in each of these companies and making these decisions use devices of their competing companies at their homes. The kids of Intel engineers use iPhones at home and the kids of Apple engineers use Intel-powered computers at school... why don't they see that they each really win when these devices get more powerful, are more efficient, feel more beautiful and are more affordable? ... if not for everyone, but for themselves and their families too. Each of them will lose their jobs at some point in time and will move to the next company sooner or later.
THE WINNER IS - THE CONSUMERS.
Funny enough, the individual staffers working in each of these companies and making these decisions use devices of their competing companies at their homes. The kids of Intel engineers use iPhones at home and the kids of Apple engineers use Intel-powered computers at school... why don't they see that they each really win when these devices get more powerful, are more efficient, feel more beautiful and are more affordable? ... if not for everyone, but for themselves and their families too. Each of them will lose their jobs at some point in time and will move to the next company sooner or later.
Exactly. M2 as a base architecture will not change that, but M3 running with ARMv9 and on 3 nm would mean a lot for performance. M2 based chips will be only a minor bump and I guess some people are going to be disappointed. But many here seems to miss the point that Mxy is just a baseline and Mxy Pro/Max/Ultra are performance focused. If thinks M2 baseline in Mb Air or baseline iMac will bring 2x more performance he will be hugely disappointed.
as said, Apple just went with what they had in their hands and was good enough (well, great to be honest) to make a transition. But we are now just passing a break performance/power consumption point between x86/ARM. In near future, when Intel (and AMD will start to hit the wall soon, too) will be struggling even more to get better performance while not raising consumption even more, ARM based processors will be even more on another level of performance per watt.
It would simply not even be possible to compare.
Big companies with huge datacenters like Amazon, Google, Microsoft etc. where power consumption (and heat) is even more critical (we are talking about tens of millions saved on eletricity per year) see this too and that is the reason why they are designing their own ARM based chips.
Good to see Intel is trying to catch up! In this game, we all benefit from competition.
People were not complaining about it (that much), because there was nothing better. It was just "a given". Now there is proof that it can be better and no one would ever want to go back to heat issues, fan noises and lower battery life.
yeah Intel-based laptops, especially in MBP's with aluminum always was the expensive way to get a vasectomy. The heat was insane! lol.