Intel Downplays Apple's M1 Chip With 'Carefully Crafted' Benchmarks

[Unregistered 4U]

Here’s hoping Apple continues to adapt and not only survive,

I think Apple has a formula where they target big shakeups every 20 years or so. This shakeup invariably alienates those who have ONLY known that version of Apple, but delights a lot of new users that continue to make Apple money for another 20 years or so, then the cycle restarts.

where the risk is for Mac users is particular is if Apple ends up being unable to keep up with Intel and AMD once they really get going again.

But that's not reality if the performance disparity gets too great.

If you’re running Final Cut Pro or Logic, the performance disparity against anything NOT macOS doesn’t matter, you just want the system that can run those apps the fastest. And, that’s really where any performance disparity matters. Computers are so fast now that even the lowest end Apple Silicon chip can meet people’s basic needs. They notice when FCP can render a scene in 43 minutes versus 66. They don’t notice when that filter they applied in Photos takes 1 ms versus 7 ms.

 

[mdriftmeyer]

Both the M1 and this upcoming processor leverage AVX 512 based vector operands to heavily skew their results in Geek Bench and other applications. In truth, neither are a leap of performance in workflows because very few applications leverage AVX 512 based vector operands on either the ARM or X86 architectures.

What's going to be a game changer is Xilinx merger with AMD for now the Zen 4 is fully incorporating its own Neural Engine, ML Engine, FPGAs for encode/decode large raw image/video formats for scrubbing and processing in real-time.

Chiplets with unified memory access via Infinity Fabric 3.0 are coming to Zen 4 Fall 2021. Anything either Intel and Apple are producing will take a back seat to these designs.

Overall, three companies are pushing the envelope forward for targeted compute and general process computing.

ARM will never be the champion of general process computing and thus the market king. It's just reality. Apple has no interest in dominating the market in computers. Nor does it have an inkling of interest in the HPC/Data Center markets.

AMD is the new leader in those and will expand over Intel leaving these Intel processors with a shrinking market space. Intel has a long way to go before its Jim Keller led designs make a dent, if at all, in the x86 markets.

 

[leman]

But thats not the point of this discussion - compared to the 11 Gen Intel the performance level of the M1 is not that superior and the Intel offers some advantages. If this is the better package to buy depends on the user.

You are right, M1 is not that much better than Tiger Lake. Single-core performance is pretty much comparable (quite a coincidence, no?), Apple can maintain clocks better in multicore, giving it a 20-50% advantage, and of course there is the healthy iGPU performance gap. M1 is an overall winner, but nothing world-staggering in relative terms...

... but then we need to remember that Tiger Lake is the best Intel can do right now and they literally have nothing better up their sleeve, since they are limited by mediocre power-efficiency of their designs and issue-laden manufacturing process. And that we are comparing end of the line 30 watt Tiger Lake SKUs to 10-15watt entry level M1 SKUs. M1X (or whatever it’s called) is around the corner and that is Apples ”ultra-mobile performance” chip. I think it will surprise some people.

 

[Patolino]

Intel is suffering the Blackberry effect. The moment Apple did launch the iPhone, Blackberry died instantly. One year after that, their market share dropped from almost 100% to near zero.

That is the same thing all over again. This time with Intel.
Intel is just agonizing its final demise as a brilliant company which created a revolution in the eighties and nineties and then died.

 

[PPietra]

Both the M1 and this upcoming processor leverage AVX 512 based vector operands to heavily skew their results in Geek Bench and other applications. In truth, neither are a leap of performance in workflows because very few applications leverage AVX 512 based vector operands on either the ARM or X86 architectures.

What's going to be a game changer is Xilinx merger with AMD for now the Zen 4 is fully incorporating its own Neural Engine, ML Engine, FPGAs for encode/decode large raw image/video formats for scrubbing and processing in real-time.

Chiplets with unified memory access via Infinity Fabric 3.0 are coming to Zen 4 Fall 2021. Anything either Intel and Apple are producing will take a back seat to these designs.

Overall, three companies are pushing the envelope forward for targeted compute and general process computing.

ARM will never be the champion of general process computing and thus the market king. It's just reality. Apple has no interest in dominating the market in computers. Nor does it have an inkling of interest in the HPC/Data Center markets.

AMD is the new leader in those and will expand over Intel leaving these Intel processors with a shrinking market space. Intel has a long way to go before its Jim Keller led designs make a dent, if at all, in the x86 markets.

Clearly you have no idea what you are talking about. AVX 512 it’s an Intel technology and the M1 does not have it, as such it does not skew the M1 Geekbench results.

 

[leman]

Both the M1 and this upcoming processor leverage AVX 512 based vector operands to heavily skew their results in Geek Bench and other applications. In truth, neither are a leap of performance in workflows because very few applications leverage AVX 512 based vector operands on either the ARM or X86 architectures.

What are you talking about? AVX512 is Intel-only technology and of course M1 doesn’t support anything like this. In addition, where is the evidence that Geekbench utilises AVX512 at all?

M1 has four independently scheduled 128-bit vector units, and it supports 128-bit ARM Neon vector instructions, which is comparable with SSE2.

What's going to be a game changer is Xilinx merger with AMD for now the Zen 4 is fully incorporating its own Neural Engine, ML Engine, FPGAs for encode/decode large raw image/video formats for scrubbing and processing in real-time.

Chiplets with unified memory access via Infinity Fabric 3.0 are coming to Zen 4 Fall 2021. Anything either Intel and Apple are producing will take a back seat to these designs.

I definitely see AMD delivering some compelling products. But in terms of peak CPU performance, Apple‘s low end can already match AMDs top Zen 3 chip - at 4-5 times lower power consumption... and of course, the biggest issue is user adoption and infrastructure. Apple controls the software and by simply using standard APIs you can take advantage of all the specialized processors. AMD will need to convince software developers to use their technology, and that will take a while.

 

[kyleh22]

I’m too much of a laymen to know which processors are better but it’s great to see some competition in the silicone space. More competition = better products for consumers!

 

[jeanlain]

Both the M1 and this upcoming processor leverage AVX 512 based vector operands to heavily skew their results in Geek Bench and other applications.

The M1 doesn't have AVX, and I'm not sure Geekbench uses it anyway.

 

[cmaier]

BUT, for companies already steeped in Dell world, if they make a decision to source their next corporate standard laptop as an ARM system, that would be a pretty big hit to Intel.

And I’m pretty sure the business I work for would do just that. We have thousands of stupid little Dell boxes, with tiny SSDs. Almost all of the applications and data sit on a remote server. When a box dies, they swap in a new stupid little Dell box, and ship off the broken one. They are all centrally configured and administered. Arm or x86 would make little difference.

 

[darthdrinker]

I don't really like benchmarks anyway and just trust my experience with the machine. I normally use a MacBook as the second or third computer. My main rig is a desktop PC configured for heavy development tasks with lots of ram and cores. The fact that after a few weeks I have now fully switched to my 16GB M1 MBA is a big thing. I still cannot believe how fast and buttery smooth everything runs. It is because of this experience now looking forward to the new iMacs to replace my whole pc setup, goodbye Intel it was fun while it lasted.

 

[chucker23n1]

Both the M1 and this upcoming processor leverage AVX 512 based vector operands to heavily skew their results in Geek Bench and other applications.

Geekbench 5 does appear to use AVX-512, but the M1 does not implement it. Also, Tiger Lake UP3 is not "upcoming". It's been out for half a year.

What's going to be a game changer is Xilinx merger with AMD for now the Zen 4 is fully incorporating its own Neural Engine, ML Engine, FPGAs for encode/decode large raw image/video formats for scrubbing and processing in real-time.

Chiplets with unified memory access via Infinity Fabric 3.0 are coming to Zen 4 Fall 2021. Anything either Intel and Apple are producing will take a back seat to these designs.

Sure. Tiger Lake is "upcoming", but a CPU slated for this fall is what we really should be watching out for. 🙄

 

[citysnaps]

This is bad strategy. Instead of doing this, which invites backlash and reeks of desperation, Intel should say something like they are excited by the competition and promise people that they have great things coming up and that fans won't be disappointed. Something like that.

With Intel still making 100+ watt CPUs fans have not a thing to worry about. The love is still there.

 

[theotherphil]

Don't take me wrong but the display of the MacBook Air is far far inferior compared to the XPS 13 11Gen.
The MacBook Airs Display looks like ... 10 years ago.

Thunderbolt 4 means you can replace the XPS's ssd with a twice as fast Thunderbolt 4 SSD - you can not replace the MacBook Air's SSD.

The XPS 13 is smaller, Dell offers far superior in House repairs and service.
You can run all the business Windows Software out of the box as well as dual boot Linux.

The XPS can be bought with 32GB RAM.

 

[hot-gril]

Not really. Buy the one you want. Simple.

Ok, then which one should you want? Techies like to give the whole "personal use-case" speech, but truth is, very few people are that special. There are only a few common use cases out there, and the personal preference mostly just decides Mac or not Mac. Given Mac, no regular consumer is picking Intel or M1 because they know which happens to run their workload faster, they just want whatever is considered overall "better." Not even a techie here on MR is going to have benchmarks showing which CPU runs their workloads best.

The one exception is if you need to run Windows software on your Mac. Then obviously, Intel.

 

[Pilot Jones]

damn intel is really flailing around HARD

this just reeks of desperation so bad

 

[hot-gril]

Is the term laptop still used today? I know people might still refer to it as a laptop but I figured we moved on to the term notebook. Apple hasn't used the term laptop or notebook in some time - they refer to them as portables.

Dunno, everyone I know calls them laptops. I've only ever heard "notebook" in ads.

 

[hot-gril]

If this is the strategy of the new Intel CEO, then I expect really hard times to intel in the next couple of years. I think that they need to ditch core i series, time to switch to a new name and product to make people interested again. Just copy what Apple is doing, simplify the line and instead of having dozens of variants of each series, then focus in one processor that is “powerful efficient” and name it with a cool name.. it’s time to take drastic decisions in my opinion !

Yeah, one thing that always annoyed me was how you really have to look at the full name (i7 4770K or whatever) to know what you're buying. Within one generation, the H or U i7 CPUs have similar performance to the desktop i5 or maybe even i3 ones. H and U are also very different, but a laptop could have either, and any laptop with a U in it won't mention that in the specs. So "i7 U" is like, this is the fastest of our slowest CPUs.

 

[richinaus]

Dunno, everyone I know calls them laptops. I only ever hear "notebook" in ads.

maybe they will start calling them laptops, now you can actually use them on a lap.....

On the intel vs M1, I need to use both. Some apps run only on windows and also others are taking their sweet time to optimise for M’s.
GPU is unproven still on M’s.

I think the current M1 laptops are amazing for consumers. I wait and see what they can deliver for professionals [not using apple apps].

 

[theotherphil]

Made a mistake ... it is an internal PCI-E 4 ssd m.2 -- the user can replace it. The pci-e 4 samsung SSD 980 Pro 2TB speeds up to 7000 mb/s read and 5000 mb/s write.

This is a similar argument that android users use. Hey, this handset has this one single feature/ hardware spec that is better than Apple’s therefore the entire device is better. These same people completely misunderstand that Apple users choose their devices based on the experience of the whole package….software and hardware working together.

 

[lordofthereef]

Just my opinion, of course, but I think intel should concern themselves more with AMD. I am unsure what "proving yourself" to Mac users does if Apple has very clearly moved on to their own M1. They aren't going to just turn back to Intel at this point. At best they would offer M1 and Intel based options, but how likely does that seem? It's not like people buying Macs going forward are going to say, "you know what? Intel performance is better, so let me just buy a PC." If you are buying a Mac, you probably want OSX.

I'd be lying if I said I wasn't bummed about losing bootcamp... I need Windows and for that reason alone it doesn't make sense for us to continue buying M1 Macs. Luckily, Macs tend to last "forever". We just retired a ten year old MBP; it had video card issues and still managed to sell for $200. We are considering our options, but it will probably be replaced by either a discounted or used more modern Intel based Mac, which should easily give us another ten years of use.

 

[leman]

Not even a techie here on MR is going to have benchmarks showing which CPU runs their workloads best.

I do, I obviously benchmarked the hell out of it on real-world code. For software development (at least my use case) and data analysis (dataset transformation and stats), M1 solidly outperforms my high-end Intel i9 16” MBP. Some memory-bandwidth heavy code up to 30% difference - because Apple has much better memory level parallelism and higher available per-core bandwidth.

 

[SonOfaMac]

Bring on the new MBP!

 

[alexandr]

Panic is often pointless.

Apple proven the ability of ARM SoC designs to outperform x86-64 in Laptop/Desktop. Which is really bad for Intel. Their low-power laptop chips aren't going to survive OEMs moving to ARMs.

They're trying to brush off the M1s, but its really AMD and Nvidia that scares them. Both are now positioned to do what Apple has done with the M1.

i see, i see. i guess i didn't consider the whole threat to intel) i guess they can panic a little

 

[Kilibee]

The real risk for Intel isn't ARM on Apple. That ship has sailed.

They are scared that people from the server and workstation world are looking at these kind of architectures, because they can't deliver. Comparing an entry level M1 to their top line sends all the wrong messages though.

 

[falainber]

After 40 years of developing x86 processors, Intel manage to edge-out Apple's first-generation laptop processor on some cherry-picked benchmarks. They even had to use a different processor to compare battery life. Congratulations, Intel.

This take is as good as Intel's one. CPU development has two main components: process and architecture. M1 uses better process than Intel processors (and Apple has nothing to do with it). ARM architecture is just a couple of years younger than x86.