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Intel launches Macbook Neo killer

DEMinSoCAL said:
One USB port is USB 2.0 which is pretty much useless except as a charge port. The other port is USB 3.0 Gen 2 (10Gbps) which is the only modern port.
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Charge port, mouse/keyboard dongle, printer, scanner, game controllers, usb audio, midi. There are plenty of uses for a usb port other than data transfer.

It's not great, but it's still more useful than not having a second port.
 
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DEMinSoCAL said:
Most every other laptop sold in the last few years has a faster SSD in it. 1500MB/s is two generations old PCI Express 3.0 speed. That was the point.
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1500+ MB/sec is overkill for anything this Neo is capable of doing. That's the actual point. Everything is just noise. PCI-E 3.0 is irrelevant. Most people don't really understand this speed. They're jaded from seeing the crazy high numbers of modern SSDs.
 
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Skwoodge said:
1500+ MB/sec is overkill for anything this Neo is capable of doing. That's the actual point. Everything is just noise. PCI-E 3.0 is irrelevant. Most people don't really understand this speed. They're jaded from seeing the crazy high numbers of modern SSDs.
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Even the fasted and most up to date SATA SSD's are going to be very slow compared to the speed of PCIE Gen 3 NVME drives.

I have a couple of DAS enclosures and a NAS. I use the NVME drives in both for stuff I access daily and the SATA drives for backups.

The Neo's USB3 and internal storage speeds are going to be fast enough for most people who are the intended market for the Neo.

I just replaced my black OWC Express 4 bay NVME enclosure with one from Terra Master. The Terra Master D4-SSD is quite a bit faster using the same Gen 4 NVME's and the same TB4 cable than the OWC Express 4M2 enclosure.
 
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Skwoodge said:
1500+ MB/sec is overkill for anything this Neo is capable of doing. That's the actual point. Everything is just noise. PCI-E 3.0 is irrelevant. Most people don't really understand this speed. They're jaded from seeing the crazy high numbers of modern SSDs.
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You're probably right but I wasn't arguing whether it was sufficient or not. I stated most everything about the Neo is underwhelming spec-wise compared to most other laptops. I'm sure 1500MB/s SSD is fine for whatever it is the Neo is meant for (whatever that is!!!), but it's still a low-performance SSD which surely is connected to the fact the CPU is meant for a phone.
 
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It doesn't really matter how "good" the CPU is, it's still not a hardware/software optimized combination pairing like Apple OS/CPU. Taking the generic out of the box Windows, and shoehorning it into the CPU du jour, will always be substandard performance.
 
DEMinSoCAL said:
You're probably right but I wasn't arguing whether it was sufficient or not. I stated most everything about the Neo is underwhelming spec-wise compared to most other laptops. I'm sure 1500MB/s SSD is fine for whatever it is the Neo is meant for (whatever that is!!!), but it's still a low-performance SSD which surely is connected to the fact the CPU is meant for a phone.
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Well there's nothing Apple can do about it because it's an iPhone chip. And they're confined to whatever the iPhone chip was capable of at the time. It's going to get better. What's actually great about this ... is now that Apple has to make macOS work with the iPhone ... and use old iPhone chips to be repurposed for the Neo ... Apple might start doing some interesting magic under the hood in iPhones moving forward. Maybe it'll eventually push Apple to 16 GB iPhones as well.

What it's meant for is to dip their toes into the mid range laptop market and make waves, and get new customers into the Apple ecosystem that wouldn't have otherwise. You might night like the specs in its current form, but this laptop isn't for you. It's plenty fast for most people doing simple things that the iPhone chip is more than capable of. The build quality is far superior to any other laptop in this price range, though.
 
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DEMinSoCAL said:
The Neo is an iPhone with a 13" screen and a keyboard. except it doesn't make cellular calls and runs macOS.
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So an iPhone chip makes it an iPhone with a 13” screen right? Funny, that chip is more capable than any chips in those market PC:s. So ai guess it doesn’t matter then that technically it’s a phone chip. Tells more how terrible those market PC chips are.
 
I have a Minisforum mITX MB with an AMD Ryzen 9 8945HX that I bought a few months ago along with a Dell Optiplex 7010 MFF with an Intel Core I5-13500T. Both are mobile chips designed for laptops. I also have a Dell Inspiron with an AMD Ryzen 7 5700U.

Both of those have a higher TDP than the A18 Pro which means more heat produced which requires proper cooling to run without throttling. The A18 Pro has a lot lower TDP so will run with less heat and longer battery life.

The Neo beats both on Geekbench single core tests. The Neo beats the Inspiron in both single and multi core tests.
  • Neo - 3175
  • Minisforum - 2859
  • Optiplex 7010 - 2400
  • Inspiron - 1128
The AMD and Intel beat the Neo on multi core tests. But that should be no surprise when comparing a 6 core CPU to a 14 core and 16 core CPU.
  • Neo - 8148
  • Minisforum - 15814
  • Optiplex - 12339
  • Inspiron - 4709
The AMD and Intel chips I have are not the latest and greatest. The I7-13500T and Ryzen 9 8945HX produce quite a bit of heat and require cooling fans. The Ryzen 7 5700U is a couple of years older but still has a higher TDP and shorter battery life.

Intel will have to come up with a CPU that performs as well or better than the A18 Pro with a low TDP to beat the Neo in heat management and battery life.
 
bapegg said:
Intel will have to come up with a CPU that performs as well or better than the A18 Pro with a low TDP to beat the Neo in heat management and battery life.
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Honestly that is unlikely to happen, because as far as I know, Intel doesn’t produce smartphone-grade processors (SoC).

The power consumption of the A18 Pro is theoretically 5-7W but it drops quickly to 2-3W… l’m not sure if Intel has a similar processor.
 
bapegg said:
Intel will have to come up with a CPU that performs as well or better than the A18 Pro with a low TDP to beat the Neo in heat management and battery life.
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The Neo runs hot, it hits 90c almost immediately, so that's a non-issue for intel and laptop makers

Lenovo IdeaPad Slim 3X, Snapdragon® X X1-26-100, 16GB of ram, and 256GB of storage. Priced at 750 before any incentives. It also has a fan, so it doesn't have the issue of near instant throttling that the Neo has.

Geekbench 6 Multi-Core: 10,300 – 12,500 and single core around 2,000 – 2,100 (from googling)

Lenovo IdeaPad Slim 3x 15 Review: A Budget-Friendly Battery Champ
 
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IIRC the Core Series 2 was a decent improvement over the first Core Series and is competitive with AMD now. If Core Series 3 is efficient I'd love to slap it in a server with ECC.
 
throAU said:
Yeah apple have proven that emulating x86 can be done fast enough if you have a competent modern architecture.
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I’ll add to this:

Intel should have done this years ago. Rather than trying to wring more performance out of x86…

Well, i guess they tried with itanium, but that was not a competent modern architecture.

Should have been a sign that all was not well at intel. Maybe it was.
 
maflynn said:
The Neo runs hot, it hits 90c almost immediately, so that's a non-issue for intel and laptop makers

Lenovo IdeaPad Slim 3X, Snapdragon® X X1-26-100, 16GB of ram, and 256GB of storage. Priced at 750 before any incentives. It also has a fan, so it doesn't have the issue of near instant throttling that the Neo has.

Geekbench 6 Multi-Core: 10,300 – 12,500 and single core around 2,000 – 2,100 (from googling)

Lenovo IdeaPad Slim 3x 15 Review: A Budget-Friendly Battery Champ
Click to expand...

So, single core just over half the “throttling” A18Pro then… at 1.5x the cost, with a fan and with a crap screen and keyboard. How’s the GPU and NPU performance?
 
bapegg said:
I have a Minisforum mITX MB with an AMD Ryzen 9 8945HX that I bought a few months ago along with a Dell Optiplex 7010 MFF with an Intel Core I5-13500T. Both are mobile chips designed for laptops
Click to expand...
Not sure about the Intel chip, but the Ryzen 9 8945HX is not a laptop chip. The HX processors are desktop chips that are shoe-horned into laptops. In AMD's case they inherit the high idle power draw of their desktop chiplet architecture.
 
bapegg said:
The AMD and Intel chips I have are not the latest and greatest. The I7-13500T and Ryzen 9 8945HX produce quite a bit of heat and require cooling fans. The Ryzen 7 5700U is a couple of years older but still has a higher TDP and shorter battery life.

Intel will have to come up with a CPU that performs as well or better than the A18 Pro with a low TDP to beat the Neo in heat management and battery life.
Click to expand...
Intel isn't, unfortunately, in the business of making phone chips or ARM chips. Snapdragon is, and that's where we look.

FWIW, I see lots of videos of people trying to cool the A18 Pro in the Neo since Apple decided it didn't need any sort of heatsink and now they discovered it throttles when pushed for any length of time. So "heat management" is throttling with the Neo.
 
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maflynn said:
The Neo runs hot, it hits 90c almost immediately, so that's a non-issue for intel and laptop makers

Lenovo IdeaPad Slim 3X, Snapdragon® X X1-26-100, 16GB of ram, and 256GB of storage. Priced at 750 before any incentives. It also has a fan, so it doesn't have the issue of near instant throttling that the Neo has.

Geekbench 6 Multi-Core: 10,300 – 12,500 and single core around 2,000 – 2,100 (from googling)

Lenovo IdeaPad Slim 3x 15 Review: A Budget-Friendly Battery Champ
Click to expand...
Even better, $499 at BestBuy right now. Comparing to the Neo, this also has far more ports, including USB-A and C, SD card reader and HDMI. WiFi 7 instead of WiFi 6, and it also has TWO SSD slots (both removable unlike Neo's forever soldered tiny SSD) and SSD's that are 3x faster than Neo. Oh, and a back-lit keyboard.

Sure, the A18 Pro is faster at single core benchmarks, but what do so many people here say about the Neo -- "the people who are buying this don't care". Same -- the people buying lower-end PC laptops don't care either as it does everything they need.
 
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