Intel's Anti-Mac Ad Campaign Highlights M1 Shortcomings

[Quu]

Actually Intels largest consumers are cloud servers not retail, they make more money selling expensive chips to corporates and Cloud customers. But they keep their dominance through market share and importanly mind share with the masses. Afterall the people making those decisions in corporates are consumers too. If they loose mind share on Desktop they loose market share of Servers. ARM is a threat and M1 is making it feasible to the change the perception.

I can't speak for other buyers but I run an internet based business and pay for many many many servers. All the new servers we deploy will be AMD based due to the performance. We're currently waiting for Milan EPYC processors to launch to do a big upgrade drive this year replacing all our dual-socket Ivy Bridge-EP based XEON systems with single-socket EPYC's.

That's going from 2 x 8 Core and 2 x 12 Core systems (16 and 24 cores) to 1 x 32 Core systems. Huge reduction in power consumption and heat combined with a huge increase in performance.

I would literally only consider buying Intel today if I'm buying old used equipment because the older Intel stuff is way better than the old AMD stuff (before EPYC). But buying new? I would never buy Intel, it makes no sense from a performance or performance per watt angle.

Not on desktops (Ryzen wins) not on Workstations (Threadripper and Threadripper Pro wins) and not on servers (Embedded EPYC and Socketable EPYC wins with single and dual sockets). Whether I need 8 cores or 128 cores AMD has something for me and at the top end Intel can't compete.

Literally the best socketable XEON you can get right now performance wise is a 28 Core but I can get a 32, 48 or even 64 core processor from AMD that is faster not just overall but also per-core due to higher IPC and base clock speeds.

And this is even before you consider AMD's memory advantage with 3200MHz ECC support, 8 channel memory vs 6 on the Intel XEON Scalable system. 2TB of RAM per processor vs 768GB-1.5TB on the XEON. The 128 PCIe 4.0 lanes vs 72 PCIe 3.0 lanes on the XEON. It's just not even comparable.

And I say that while having a Core i9 10980XE 18 Core in my workstation and a Core i9 8 Core in my 16" MacBook Pro and so forth, I just see what is available and buying Intel today just makes no sense to me until they come up with something new.

 

[pers0n]

"Go PC"

lmao, that's the best punchline the marketing team could come up?

Funny because "Go PC" could easily mean, "Go PC with and AMD CPU"

 

[sully54]

Lol. Intel, AMD is your real threat. Shows how out of touch you are. So, good luck with whatever you’re trying to accomplish with these ads.

 

[Stella]

If anything, this should give a kick up Intel's ass to improve their CPUs. They are failing behind AMD, and Apple is a threat.

It's a win for consumers.

 

[Cayden]

I guess I got lucky when I bought rocket league on steam a few years ago. I can still play it fine on my 13” MacBook Pro from 2015

 

[JosepPont]

To… what end?



Which users?

Is the goal here to make Apple push Psyonix to bring Rocket League back to the Mac?

I'm refering that when two companies start a competition it will go in benefit to ALL users of both companies. I don't see (and don't want) Apple releasing a macbook with touchscreen but if Intel is putting Apple in a embarrance situation then Apple will improve his lineup to shut up Intel. That is what I see.

 

[pankajdoharey]

......

Not on desktops (Ryzen wins) not on Workstations (Threadripper and Threadripper Pro wins) and not on servers (Embedded EPYC and Socketable EPYC wins with single and dual sockets). Whether I need 8 cores or 128 cores AMD has something for me and at the top end Intel can't compete.

Literally the best socketable XEON you can get right now performance wise is a 28 Core but I can get a 32, 48 or even 64 core processor from AMD that is faster not just overall but also per-core due to higher IPC and base clock speeds.

...

Absolutely, which is why it is baffling for Intel to attack M1, attacking AMD makes more sense.

 

[pankajdoharey]

That John dude gets paid by intel, why didn't he mentioned that at beginning?

He did, you will see "Paid Promotion" in the lower left bottom in small letters at the beginning of the video.

 

[Bluetoot-]

You know, I should have gotten in the tech shil- I mean reviewer game back in the day. I could have made a pretty living.

 

[amaze1499]

Absolutely, which is why it is baffling for Intel to attack M1, attacking AMD makes more sense.

Probably its because Apple is a premium brand for their customers. With Apple moving away from Intel maybe it devalues the Intel brand itself. Just guessing.

 

[Zen_Arcade]

Serious question - how do low end Intel processors, like the i3/i5 used in prior MBAs and 13" MBPs, compare to the M1?

From the benchmarks I have seen the M1 is faster than many of Intel's higher end (and much more expensive) CPUs. And my experience with my M1 MBA (16/1TB) is that it's considerably faster than the Intel MBA (1.1/16/1TB) it replaced.

What are we missing?

 

[Rigby]

Serious question - how do low end Intel processors, like the i3/i5 used in prior MBAs and 13" MBPs, compare to the M1?

From the benchmarks I have seen the M1 is faster than many of Intel's higher end (and much more expensive) CPUs. And my experience with my M1 MBA (16/1TB) is that it's considerably faster than the Intel MBA (1.1/16/1TB) it replaced.

What are we missing?

Given that the M1 is a new CPU, the proper comparison would be Intel's Tiger Lake models (which keep up quite well in terms of performance).

I'm not sure what all the hubbub is about. These ads seem akin to Apple's "I'm a Mac - I'm a PC" ads. Probably Intel trying to help out their laptop OEMs.

 

[pankajdoharey]

Probably its because Apple is a premium brand for their customers. With Apple moving away from Intel maybe it devalues the Intel brand itself. Just guessing.

You have a point.

 

[crazy dave]

It was GeekBench results I saw, IIRC. It wasn't something reported on MR, I read about it somewhere else in the context of gaming PC hardware. I'll still be buying an AMD when I update my gaming PC (and obviously my next Mac will be ARM), but my point is they're still completely competitive with AMD, in single core performance, despite their huge lag in process node, which says pretty good things about their designs, I think.

While Alder lake might improve things, Rocket lake at 14nm is only competitive with Zen3 in single core at the expense of massive power - maybe matters a little less in a desktop but there it is. Tiger lake at 10nm is better, but still more power hungry than Zen 3 at TSMC 7nm. However it is not clear how TSMC 7nm vs Intel 10nm stack up. Some indications are that Intel 10 is at least as good as TSMC 7 maybe slightly better. So Intel is not quite as behind in manufacturing as people think, but that means they are further behind in design.

 

[Billyk711]

He did, you will see "Paid Promotion" in the lower left bottom in small letters at the beginning of the video.

Missed it, so u understand it was a commercial and the dude should be embarrassed.

 

[NT1440]

While Alder lake might improve things, Rocket lake at 14nm is only competitive with Zen3 in single core at the expense of massive power - maybe matters a little less in a desktop but there it is. Tiger lake at 10nm is better, but still more power hungry than Zen 3 at TSMC 7nm. However it is not clear how TSMC 7nm vs Intel 10nm stack up. Some indications are that Intel 10 is at least as good as TSMC 7 maybe slightly better. So Intel is not quite as behind in manufacturing as people think, but that means they are further behind in design.

Which is a bigger concern. If their roadmap is mostly iterative rather than an overhaul it’s going to take YEARS to catch up in the performance per watt field.

 

[crazy dave]

Given that the M1 is a new CPU, the proper comparison would be Intel's Tiger Lake models (which keep up quite well in terms of performance).

I'm not sure what all the hubbub is about. These ads seem akin to Apple's "I'm a Mac - I'm a PC" ads. Probably Intel trying to help out their laptop OEMs.

The problem is it doesn’t. These ads aren’t very good. Apple is still one of their OEMs and helping “PCs” when the engineering leader in PC is AMD not Intel, is free advertising for a competitor than is more a direct threat to Intel than Apple. The only saving grave is that because AMD is considered so good and AMD is still a small outfit, AMD is already selling every chip it can make and so free advertising from Intel may not actually help them.

Also while TGL is by no means a failure of a chip, no it’s not really that competitive in perf especially not when power is taken into account. Zen 3 is much closer and in heavily multithreaded tasks might even be better, but Intel still has a ways to go. TGL simply means their clocks aren’t being cleaned by both Zen 3 and A14. Alder lake may be competitive, we’ll see in the Fall.

 

[jeanlain]

ROFL! Yeah "Go Mac" sure, I have a M1 and like it, but this made me almost spit out my coffee...

Go PC:

Go Mac:

lol "Go Mac" bwahahah I'm still laughing...

Your point?
The Unreal Engine editor has a Mac version and the M1 chipset is probably better than any Intel laptop chipset for this task, even under Rosetta.
There's also Unity 3D.

 

[crazy dave]

Which is a bigger concern. If their roadmap is mostly iterative rather than an overhaul it’s going to take YEARS to catch up in the performance per watt field.

In fairness Alder lake is supposed to be yet another new uarch and another IPC increase. TGL was so delayed that they are now bumping into each other. So we’ll see in the fall. Alder lake may be a competitive chip to current gen chips but of course, equally it may not be.

 

[cmaier]

Which is a bigger concern. If their roadmap is mostly iterative rather than an overhaul it’s going to take YEARS to catch up in the performance per watt field.

Takes AMD about 2.5 years from back-of-the-napkin to tape-out. I never worked at Intel, but word in the valley is it took them closer to 3 years (maybe that’s changed now). And that assumes that the fab delivers what was promised at the start. They really need to focus on their 5nm node, getting it up and running by the time TSMC gets their 3nm node running. Whatever architecture they have planned won’t mean squat, even if they deliver on time, if they are a process node behind TSMC. (Intel 5nm should be approximately equivalent to TSMC 3nm in terms of feature sizes and spacings).

 

[pankajdoharey]

Missed it, so u understand it was a commercial and the dude should be embarrassed.

It was a terrible commercial, some german guy even commented "Better to be poor and Honest than paid and dishonest".

 

[pankajdoharey]

Takes AMD about 2.5 years from back-of-the-napkin to tape-out. I never worked at Intel, but word in the valley is it took them closer to 3 years (maybe that’s changed now). And that assumes that the fab delivers what was promised at the start. They really need to focus on their 5nm node, getting it up and running by the time TSMC gets their 3nm node running. Whatever architecture they have planned won’t mean squat, even if they deliver on time, if they are a process node behind TSMC. (Intel 5nm should be approximately equivalent to TSMC 3nm in terms of feature sizes and spacings).

Intel Board needs to put an Engineer in Charge, get rid of the marketing/MBA people from CEO Positions. Get rid of Bureaucracy.

 

[MacBH928]

"If your lap skin has 3rd degree burns, you are not on an M1 Mac. Go PC."
"If you are wearing hearing aid due to damaged created by your laptops fan noise, you are not on an M1 Mac. Go PC."

Seriously, even their CEO said Apple is beating them in their own game. Apple is not Intel competitor why are they fighting? Intel is probably salty because Apple beat them at their own game.

 

[Rigby]

The problem is it doesn’t. These ads aren’t very good. Apple is still one of their OEMs and helping “PCs” when the engineering leader in PC is AMD not Intel, is free advertising for a competitor than is more a direct threat to Intel than Apple. The only saving grave is that because AMD is considered so good and AMD is still a small outfit, AMD is already selling every chip it can make and so free advertising from Intel may not actually help them.

The engineering leader is TSMC. Only thanks to their process technology is AMD beating Intel in some market segments. But AMD doesn't have the scale and product breadth to really threaten Intel.

Also while TGL is by no means a failure of a chip, no it’s not really that competitive in perf especially not when power is taken into account. Zen 3 is much closer and in heavily multithreaded tasks might even be better, but Intel still has a ways to go. TGL simply means their clocks aren’t being cleaned by both Zen 3 and A14

You have a point about power consumption, but Tiger Lake holds its own in terms of performance, even with half the number of cores. The 8-core version will likely beat M1 handily.

Apple has never been about just CPU performance. Their strength is that the whole laptop design is very well balanced and integrated. Intel is increasingly trying to do the same thing working with their OEMs. That's what the "Evo" initiative is about that they are marketing in these promotions.

 

[Alan Wynn]

I'm not sure any company can punch down at two-trillian-dollar Apple.

X86 based laptops and desktops control somewhere between 85% and 93% of the market. ”Punching Down” is not a problem because it is a moral issue as it would be picking a fight with a person much smaller than you are, it is problem because it validates your competitor. Most people would not have even considered a Macintosh when they considered buying a new computer, and these ads risk a situation where people’s tech friends comment on why Intel is running them. I might get some number of people to consider a Macintosh that never would have before. It is rule in advertising that one does not mention one’s competition if they are much smaller (in the product space) because one does not want to promote them unwittingly.

To be clear, as a Macintosh user, I am not insulted by Intel’s ads, I am amused by them because of what it says about Intel’s fear of Apple’s future products.

I think the difference is tone. Apple's adverts felt a little more jovial, more good natured.

That is also true. These are just not great ads, even if their goal as ads made sense.