16 ms·

Alder Lake Core i9 processor is faster than the M1 Max

225 points by kofejnik 5y ago

grae_QED 5y ago
Even if it is faster than the M1, I'm done with Intel. The M1 is fast enough for my uses and there needs to be more disruption within the consumer chip market. I've been using ThinkPads with Intel CPU's for at least 15 years. My next laptop will be something with an M1 or better.
yeetaccount4 5y ago
- dang 5y ago
  We've banned this account for repeatedly breaking the site guidelines. Please see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30106519 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30106519. (I'm just posting this here to increase the odds that you see this, since the comment I replied to at that link is already a few days old.)
  - yeetaccount4 5y ago
bashtoni 5y ago
Whilst consuming over 100 watts versus ~40 watts for the M1 max.
dijit 5y ago
3.5%-5% increase in performance at more than double the wattage, for a chip that is not in consumers hands against a chip that basically hasn't changed and was released 14 months ago~ This is not the victory that the title implies. It's also a _little_ bit funny that the i9 laptop was double the price, given people usually rant loudly about how expensive Apple computers are.
- chii 5y ago
  the fact is, apple hardware is not _that_ expensive relative to what you get for the money. Their supply chain is super optimized, and it's hard to beat them on price if a competitor decides to try (at the same quality that is).
  - fartcannon 5y ago
    Yeah but it's locked down, unupgradable future e-waste.
    - crims0n 5y ago
      I would argue the opposite, still using my 2012 15” MacBook Pro… a decade later. Go to Walmart and look at the laptops on display, and tell me any of those are capable lasting near a decade.
      - addicted 5y ago
        That’s not true of the current Macs though. I still have a 2011 era MacBook that I can use, and was very pleasant to use until an OS update a couple of years ago. But that was because I was able to upgrade the RAM, the SSD, and replace the battery. None of those things are possible with macs from the last few years, so their longevity is much more likely to resemble phones than older macs.
        BoorishBears 5y ago
        The secondary market simply doesn't agree with the weird obsession with calling Apple's hardware future e-waste just because you can't change out an SSD. Mac hardware holds value because it's well built, supported for a long time, has specs that are enough for a wide range of users... - For every power user running through battery cycles every day, there's people who just need a solid well built machine and won't feel the need to upgrade just because their machine gets less battery life, or a given IDE needs more RAM. Those people don't replace hardware because it's broken, they replace it because it feels old. Design wise, materials wise, etc. Not having crummy bloatware slowly accreting gigabytes of junk and a dozen extra startup items. Compare a sub $1000 M1 Air to any other sub $1000 laptop coming out today. You'd be incredibly hard pressed to find anything even half as well designed... that's how you get people to keep their hardware.
RandomBK 5y ago
> During the Cinebench R23 multi-core test, the Alder Lake laptop was consistently in the 100-watt range, [...] M1 Max’s power draw was 39.7 watts Ouch. > MSI GE76 Raider got 6 hours of offline video playback, a far cry from the MacBook Pro’s 17 hours. Double ouch. That's a huge gap, and 6 is low even in absolute terms. It's still a nice beefy chip, but still a far cry from the engineering marvel that Apple pulled off with the M1
- _joel 5y ago
  About twice the price too.
- friedman23 5y ago
  100 watts, so basically I have no reason to use this over a desktop. The battery life on the m1 macbooks is a game changer. I don't need more power out of my laptop I need it to be cool to the touch and last at least 9 hours with normal usage.
  - philistine 5y ago
    With those laptops, we're back to the days of the luggables. It's a desktop you can carry, with some caveats in terms of performance related to the choice of parts. Apple is truly playing a different game.
    - theshrike79 5y ago
      Apple in-housing their chip design was a brilliant move. The A-series processors were a good indication what was coming up, but still the M1 blew me away. Still waiting to see what they'll do with Mac Pro + M-series. Do they go for a M2 or just slap a dozen M1s in parallel =)
- gnufied 5y ago
  With RTX 3080 Ti though. So yeah - I don't think it can match Apple M1 efficiency but reviews of P-series and U-series Alder Lake mobile CPUs are going to be interesting and what I am looking forward to.
xt00 5y ago
Yea the old narrative of "arm is power efficient, but doesn't actually run real desktop level stuff at that power level" is pretty dead at this point.. it now runs desktop level stuff at 3x lower power than intel's latest chips.. and the potential for apple's chips to keep improving at that same power envelope is definitely there.. so...
- loeg 5y ago
  Yeah, ARM is fine, as long as Mac meets your needs. No other ARM is close, and as a PC hardware platform, it’s still a giant pain compared to x86.
  - MBCook 5y ago
    Seems like Graviton may be there, but of course Amazon isn’t going to sell those to anyone.
    - klelatti 5y ago
      No but Graviton is a modified Neoverse which others do sell - eg Ampere
  - terafo 5y ago
    If there was a way to put Altra Max into PC, it would rip and tear threadripper apart.
- mhh__ 5y ago
  The ARM ISA are ARM as implemented by a team with decades of low power chip design expertise is possibly not the same thing. There probably is a quantifiably larger (than for raw performance) perf/watt tax with X86, but on the same process I'm not convinced it's all that huge. Intel were resting on their laurels for way too long. They've risen to the challenge rather than started panic-selling (give up on process), so exciting times are ahead I hope.
- baq 5y ago
  everybody loves the standard ARM firmware, BIOS and bootloader. right? right...?
sydthrowaway 5y ago
Dumb question, but whats the engineering principle behind higher performance when increasing power usage? Is it because pipelines are clocked faster?
- jeffbee 5y ago
  Higher clocks of the same part always draw more power, more than proportionally to the increase in clock speed because the voltage in the core also needs to increase to reach the higher clock.
- AtlasBarfed 5y ago
  I would guess it is some combination of: - longer pipelines - more silicon dedicated to speculative execution for more Instruction Level Parallelism - bigger caches - More analysis of incoming instruction stream to get more ILP and out of order execution But yeah, more clock is more power is more heat.
- jagger27 5y ago
  I'm not sure if I'm reading your question correctly, but the general idea behind running really hot and fast is to get tasks done more quickly and return to a lower power state. The "big" cores of chips like the M1 are meant to run "bursty" workloads, where as the the "little" cores are better lightweight longer running tasks (and also take up much less die space, which is another major factor).
- wmf 5y ago
  For transistors, power = frequency x voltage^2 x capacitance and since voltage is proportional to frequency it means power ~= frequency^3. That's why Alder Lake is quite efficient at low clocks but crazy power hungry when you let it turbo.
- renewiltord 5y ago
  Not sure at what level you want the answer and others are answering at other layers so I'll cover this one. Ultimately, the faster clock means you're discharging and charging things at the gate level more often. Changing this state expends energy. More changing, more energy used per unit time, more power necessary.
dinvlad 5y ago
They should change the title to "slightly faster at massively larger TDP"
- jeffbee 5y ago
  Peak performance is still interesting, no matter what power it draws. Keep in mind that if Apple could make their thing faster by cranking up the TDP, they absolutely would do so, at least in the MacBook Pro, Mac mini, and iMac where it hardly matters, if not in the Air. And perhaps they will do so in a future revision. We're due for new parts from Apple pretty soon.
- MBCook 5y ago
  The original title has an asterisk on the end. It seems to have been stripped at some point.
justinzollars 5y ago
The impressive feature of Apple Silicon is its energy efficiency. I have both a Linux laptop and apple laptop - The Intel Linux system eats battery. At times a full charge lasts only an hour; my apple on the other hand lasts all day.
sys_64738 5y ago
Performance Per Watt matters to Intel except when it doesn't. But really when you have to dissipate so much heat then the chip will be throttled. Apple's ARM chips are only getting started.
- rvz 5y ago
  Exactly. Apple is not even trying and Intel only just caught up. This year, they will find out that the M2 will set them back another 2 years.
  - schleck8 5y ago
    > This year, they will find out that the M2 will set them back another 2 years. Luckily there will be the new zen 4 apus to wipe the floor with them
p1necone 5y ago
A lot of people are misinterpreting the results here (understandably, the article is pretty bad). They're benchmarking the CPU, but measuring the power draw of a whole laptop - including a dedicated 3080ti GPU which will still be drawing a decent amount of power even at idle. This benchmark is useful for measuring the speed and power draw of /this specific laptop/ vs an m1 MacBook, but not so much this new i9 in general. Laptop CPU performance also varies massively even across the exact same chip depending on thermal design, so this chip on average could potentially be either much slower or much faster than this benchmark suggests.
- MBCook 5y ago
  I’m guessing this is the first laptop Anandtech could get their hands on with this new chip. That said I’ve been out of the PC space for quite a while. Do mobile discrete GPUs greatly draw much power when mostly idle (such as general desktop work)? Did others give up on switching the discrete GPU on and off a needed as Apple used to do (and gave up on IIRC)?
  - p1necone 5y ago
    I believe there are laptops you can buy that do that well, but it's not universal. Software support in Windows and Linux for swapping between a low power integrated GPU and a dedicated one on demand was rather spotty last time I had a system like that, but things might have changed since then (~6 years ago).
    - MBCook 5y ago
      I had one of the Apple ones and while it worked well the software was spotty there too. It tried to guess when the discrete was needed but turned it on far too often. Which quickly made it hot and killed the battery. Since I rarely gamed I ended up using a 3rd party utility to force the discrete GPU off 98% of the time and the laptop was much better for it. I understand why Apple did that (power draw when GPU on) and why they gave up (didn’t work well at all).
  - skavi 5y ago
victorronin 5y ago
I switched about half a year ago from a MacBook Pro with an Intel processor to MacBook Pro with an M1 processor. My overall impression was "when the hell will it run out of power"? I spent the whole working day (without a charger) and it was still at 60%, while I was constantly stressed before when I had to do something without a charger for more than 3-4 hours. I don't care what any test, but tripling battery life with no visible performance degradation is a huge win in my book.
- MBCook 5y ago
  I replaced an older MBP with the M1 air. It ran circles around the old machine despite being the lowest spec. Battery is light years ahead. And it doesn’t even have a fan. So it’s dead silent. Never gets hot unlike the old Intel. There isn’t any mechanical component to fail except the hinge and the keyboard. I was worried I might regret not waiting for the higher spec M1s. Now that just seems totally unnecessary for me. PS: Work later gave me a high spec 2019 Intel MBP. It’s slower, louder, and much hotter than my Air. And at least 2.5x the price. Amazing.
  - ramijames 5y ago
    I had a 2019 Intel MBP. I hated that machine with a vengeance. It was always hot, and because of that always throttled. I live in a hot place (Israel) and during the summer of 2021 the heat caused a massive expansion of the battery which destroyed the laptop. I went for an M1 in late 2021 after using a Windows machine for a few months and hating every moment of it. The M1 is simply incomparable. Fast. Silent. It feels futuristic.
- Gatsky 5y ago
  I don’t find the same. Chrome seems to eat the battery a lot in my experience.
  - Multiplayer 5y ago
    I deeply regret getting only 16gb ram in my air for exactly this reason.
gnufied 5y ago
I know everyone is going to jump the gun and declare how mediocre Intel's offerings are in terms of power efficiency but lets not forget that this Laptop is also running RTX 3080Ti and historically more 5% performance on Alder Lake CPUs requires somehow way more power. Same thing happened during 12900K reviews. IMO - it would be interesting to see benchmark of P and U series Laptops. Honestly I do not think they are going to beat Apple M1 yet - but having a 14 or 10 core CPUs in <45w envelop will be interesting. I do not think Intel is even after Apple yet but they look to have caught up and surpassed AMD with this release for sure. For enthusiast in me - who likes a Laptop that can run Linux without problems, an all Intel 14core Laptop with <45w power budget will be great.
- teaearlgraycold 5y ago
  > I do not think Intel is even after Apple yet but they look to have caught up and surpassed AMD with this release for sure. Such a beautiful sentence to read. Love the actual competition these days.
- tehbeard 5y ago
  > I do not think Intel is even after Apple yet but they look to have caught up and surpassed AMD with this release for sure. Hmmm, as I've said before on other reviews around 12th gen, it feels like they've just pulled some levers around the power/thermal envelope being targeted (atleast on i9s?). Not really much more they can squeeze out of it that way... I'd love to see some competition, but this feels like such a short term way to get "back in the game".
- sid-ant 5y ago
  There is no Intel 14core laptop with <45w power budget at the frequencies this benchmark was performed. i9-12900HK consumes 115W of Turbo Power (PL2) [1] At 45W it can only do 2.5Ghz ( literally half ) on P cores and 1.8Ghz on E cores. It would be really interesting to see how this processor works with TB disabled which is really easy thing to do. [1] https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/docs/processors/core/12th-gen-core-mobile-processors-brief.html https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/docs/proces...
ggm 5y ago
You kind-of want this to be true, in the sense that if there isn't incremental improvement in a later product, something is wrong with VLSI design. That said, it's always interesting to look at why things are faster. More interesting than just being faster. If (eg) Intel are doing something smart in L1 cache, or ensuring no stalls, it would be cool if its applicable to ARM derived hardware. And if not, it would be cool to see how it maxes out, and how a future ARM tick-tock response in time shows benefits in different spaces. Also, this at LEAST a 2D cost/benefit matrix now. Speed+Power. Sometimes, no point being fastest if it costs more and your battery runs out faster. Remember Apple puts the M1 in portable units, where power/battery is a significant "feature" behind the purchase. Yes, I run my apple mostly plugged in. The time I get off-plug is huge. Faster intel which drains me on a flight isn't a plus.
DimmieMan 5y ago
This focus on raw performance makes sense when comparing desktop workstations but for laptops it misses the point and I hope it goes out of fashion. My MacBook Air runs Jetbrains + a couple containers just fine for almost a couple of work days on battery. Is this i9 faster? Yes but at a 6 hour battery life and 2.9Kg of weight it might as well be a desktop (just save money and buy/build a better desktop or get a console until PC parts are cheaper again). e: a cursory look suggests that laptop is also around $800 (AUD) more expensive than the (complete overkill for most) M1 it's comparing to, this is absolutely not a win.
- vmception 5y ago
  My M1 Max has insane battery life! I already take it for granted but I was just thinking about it the other day.
  - MBCook 5y ago
    When I first got my M1 air I had it charged all the way and then had to put it aside for a few days. It wasn’t plugged in. I came back and it had lost like 3%. My Intel Mac it replaced would have used up most of not all of its battery. And that’s to say nothing of the crazy battery life in use.
- BeefWellington 5y ago
  > his focus on raw performance makes sense when comparing desktop workstations but for laptops it misses the point and I hope it goes out of fashion. > a cursory look suggests that laptop is also around $800 (AUD) more expensive than the (complete overkill for most) M1 it's comparing to, this is absolutely not a win. Regarding both points, the i9 laptop they tested has a 3080Ti in it, which would account for both the price difference and power draw just on its own. Even in CPU-only tests just having the discrete GPU on will chew power. The article is making a poor comparison here: The customer of the M1 Max is not going to be the same target customer of the MSI Raider series. These are not in any way comparable laptops. We'll have to see what happens when someone gets to test a business-targeted Dell or Lenovo system with the Alder Lake CPUs. The M1 will no doubt win the iGPU tests but power consumption will be a more interesting measure.
tims33 5y ago
Hopefully this turns into a situation where consumers and technologists are the winners. Pat Gelsinger was pretty clear on how he felt about the situation with Apple when he joined Intel and it seems clear we'll see Intel continue to improve. Ultimately this competition should product better products and better prices.
- MBCook 5y ago
  It’s always great to have someone come in and give the market leader a good kick in the ass. Causes things to improve so much faster than they would have otherwise. Remember what AMD releasing the Hammer/Athlon64 architecture did to Intel? Got them off the P4 and eventually lead to the far faster and more efficient Core2 series.
  - BeefWellington 5y ago
    The Ryzen series seems to have done that for Intel too recently. I'm hopeful that this new split-core design Intel is going with pays dividends for them. As a consumer it's good to have robust competition.
johnnyAghands 5y ago
Click bait -- per watt ftw
snowwrestler 5y ago
Imagine going back 10 or 15 years and telling everyone that in 2022 it is newsworthy when an Intel laptop chip is actually faster than an Apple Mac chip. I feel like most folks would have thought it sounded like bad Apple fan fiction.
johnklos 5y ago
Hold on - it's 2022, and an extremely high end $4000 laptop with the latest Intel CPU and an NVIDIA 3080Ti comes with a display that's... 1080 resolution? My 2008 17" MacBook Pro has a screen that's 1920 x 1200. My iPhone 6+ is 1920 x 1080. What am I missing? Is the non-Apple world really fine with stagnant resolutions?
- neogodless 5y ago
  > Is the non-Apple world really fine with stagnant resolutions? Exactly one specific version of one exact laptop has 1080p, and you jump to that conclusion? You are missing 99.999% of the picture here!
  - MBCook 5y ago
    It’s one laptop. But it’s not a $350 laptop. It’s $4000. It has the top of the line Intel chip and (what I believe) is the top of the line GPU out now. If any laptop was going to have a good screen I’d think it was this one. Nope. $1100 Air has a better screen.
    - neogodless 5y ago
      > If any laptop was going to have a good screen I’d think it was this one. Well no... they put a very fast (high refresh) gaming screen in a gaming laptop. If you want QHD or 4K screens, they are out there. That's not... more than a Google away. So it's a really bad assumption to make. Here, first google result for "Intel 4K laptop", it's $1500. https://www.bestbuy.com/site/asus-zenbook-flip-15-q538ei-15-6-touch-screen-laptop-intel-core-i7-16gb-memory-gtx1650ti-max-q-1tb-ssd-grey/6436221.p?skuId=6436221 https://www.bestbuy.com/site/asus-zenbook-flip-15-q538ei-15-... Your faulty logic was disproved.
      - MBCook 5y ago
        According to The Verge there is another configuration of this machine with double the RAM and a 4K 240Hz for the same price. Why in the world would you want a 1080p display just to get an extra 120 FPS? Even if you can perceive that difference (which I kind of doubt) you’re not going to get rates that high with your settings up high anyway. In The Verge’s tests only the old CS:GO got above 150 (it got over 400!). “ In conclusion, putting a 1080p screen on this system is like sticking an MLB player in a Little League game. Sure, he’s gonna look impressive, but what is the point? These are 4K chips, and I’m not just referring to the price of this unit.”
jtian 5y ago
For sure, it's not honorable to beat M1 Max (or M1 Pro, as they share exactly the same CPU part) at high wattage. I am genuinely curious if someone can verify the 35w-case (see https://www.zdnet.com/article/ces-2022-intel-says-it-has-a-mobile-i9-that-will-beat-the-apple-m1-max/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/ces-2022-intel-says-it-has-a-m...). Also, it may derail: it seems that we could never have all good things at the same time: 1. Apple and NVIDIA: previously, what do you expect when two control freaks meet? And now Apple has its in-house GPU, we will never see an all-around Mac anyway. 2. Even if Intel makes M*-like chips, its customer (OEMs) won't afford it anyway: 200 GB/s memory for CPU is simply server grade (e.g., the memory bandwidth is like Xeon Sapphire Rapids'), too expensive for consumer use. (edited for formatting)
1024core 5y ago
FTA: > In the end, though, comparing Alder Lake and the M1 ends up being a simple academic exercise that doesn’t amount to much. There you have it.
Thorrez 5y ago
Are these benchmarks on the M1 compiled to ARM or x86?
nikolay 5y ago
Faster, yeah, slightly... but at what price?!
marricks 5y ago
Intel normally releases lowest end chips first (maybe because it's easier to get volume of them because of binning) but this year flipped that so we all talk about the highest benchmark chips first. Yes, that means chips meant to be paired with dedicated GPU. Gives one the impression these are the most favorable comparisons with some benchmarks better than Apple. Then when we get to the lower wattage chips Intel will be able to claim they have just as good power draw too. I'm not sure they'd do that inversion if they knew their chips were overall better.
neogodless 5y ago
Whether you're an Intel fan, an Apple fan, or just anti-Intel (or anti-Apple), I feel like there's not much effort here to see the complete picture. First, yes Apple Silicon M1 (any variety) is, with 100% certainty more efficient than Intel's Alder Lake 12th generation CPUs. And the performance is often better than Intel's best for specific workloads. Second, you can look at just a few benchmarks and pick winners. You can look at maximum power draw and pick losers. Or you can look at a lot of other things. For one, Alder Lake is a big improvement over their previous "10nm" aka "Intel 7" CPUs, both in performance, and in efficiency. But they were coming from a pretty big deficit. Second, Alder Lake seems to be able to draw a lot of power out of the box. But, it also performs almost as well when limited somewhat. For more interesting benchmarks, see how it does limited to 75W[0]. If you want great battery life, and MacOS works for you, there's no reason to join this debate. You win, you get the M1 and all the goodness that comes with it. If you've got a very specific job that requires maximum performance, you really need to see how the performance is on that task, and whether you can afford to trade off on battery life, or just need limited portability. Of course MacWorld is not incentivized to color Intel in the best light, and neither any Mac faithful. But it's also weird to ignore the massive improvements here over Intel's 11th gen. It's technology and engineering, and it's a better showing than we saw out of Intel for quite some time. They spent the early part of the previous decade making tiny improvements to their same 4 core CPUs over and over. Then they spent the second half making mistakes in their process nodes. Alder Lake isn't perfect, but I appreciate it for what it is. [0] https://youtu.be/Ur3Y2vxpTWo?t=345 https://youtu.be/Ur3Y2vxpTWo?t=345
walrus01 5y ago
An MSI GE76 is significantly fatter, heavier and hotter than a macbook pro 14 inch. It's not a fair comparison at all. This is comparing a thin/light laptop with a designed-for-purpose gaming laptop. Here's an image showing the large heat exhaust vents. https://storage-asset.msi.com/global/picture/image/feature/nb/GE/GE76-Raider/images/gallery-id02.png https://storage-asset.msi.com/global/picture/image/feature/n...
gigel82 5y ago
Don't know first-hand about Alder Lake, but I have an Asus laptop running an AMD 5900HS CPU (with a 3070 GPU), and an M1 Max for work. I can buy 3 Asus laptops for the price of the Macbook, and despite that I still prefer working with it. Full disclosure, we're mostly a Windows shop so I'm very rarely using the Macbook for actual development (mostly just doing builds and running tests on it, otherwise just use it on a second monitor for browsing and Spotify :)). Yes, it's subjective; I'm sure in some purely synthetic benchmark the Macbook wins, but in real life they're pretty close. And if I were actually lugging it around, I may prefer the lighter / quieter Macbook (but likely remote-ing into some Windows box or running Parallels would hurt perf enough to hate it). I can also game on the Asus too :)
watersb 5y ago
The Alder Lake monster review on AnandTech is fun. A desktop replacement laptop: ten pounds! 150 Watts! nVidia RTX! Whips and chains! https://www.anandtech.com/show/17223/intel-alder-lake-h-core-i9-12900hk-review-msi-raider-ge76-goes-hybrid https://www.anandtech.com/show/17223/intel-alder-lake-h-core... It's almost exactly three times as fast in CineBench as my MacBook Air, and cost about 3x as much, weight also about 3x. A useless comparison, but kind of funny to imagine rolling in there with three MacBook Airs, set up some distributed load network, and claiming victory. The Alder Lake box has 100% more CUDA. (I couldn't figure out the idle power draw from the review, AnandTech publishes their raw data, so maybe it's in there somewhere. https://www.anandtech.com/bench https://www.anandtech.com/bench )
midrus 5y ago
(*) This processor might require a nuclear power plant attached to your laptop.
midrus 5y ago
It is funny and sad at the same time to see how desperate Intel is about the fact they're not building the most powerful processors anymore.
AceJohnny2 5y ago
It amuses me how the decades-long market leader is scrambling to recover from the blow Apple dealt them. What could have been if the Itanium had worked out. If they had done something good with XScale. If, if...
- andreime 5y ago
  From the blow AMD dealt them.
watersb 5y ago
Also, on my MacBook tonight, the CPU core temperatures reported via Macs Fan Control were ambient temperature. Which seems kinda crazy. It was idling the CPUs, as it performs the most important task of the hour: downloading another 2GB system update.
synaesthesisx 5y ago
Somehow I can almost guarantee the M-series will outperform this in real-world usage.
accountLost 5y ago
This is a 10nm processor, right ? So a 10mn processor can be as fast as a 5mn processor but at more than double the voltage ? Not so bad. What would be the perf of this processor with TSMC 5nm tech ?
- sroussey 5y ago
  Those numbers are not comparable. In fact, these days they are meaningless. Intel used to measure a part of a transistor. Worked well until the geometry of the transistor changed and there wasn’t something comparable. So they chose something different that kinda looked right. TSMC chose something else. These numbers are meaningless. Mostly all the fabs really are talking about transistors per mm. But if you look closely, logic density is changing at a different rate than other things like those that make up sram (particularly TSMC). Those caches are increasing size because 1) new designs want more MB and 2) sram density is not improving as well as logic density so caches are taking up more space in a relative basis if all you do is a die shrink.
  - accountLost 5y ago
    Thank you for your answer. I got instantly buried below the "bad perf per watt" comments and thought nobody would see my question.
ksec 5y ago
1. The M1 / M1 Pro / Max Single Core Max out at around 5W. On TSMC 5nm, at 3.2Ghz. 2. The AlderLake i9-12900HK, is on Intel 7nm ( Or Intel7 ), runs with a a maximum of 5Ghz. My guess the power for single core on this chip is anywhere from 15W to 20W. 3. The Single core performance between the two are about ~5% to 20% if you are SIMD heavy. There are lots of people in thread and the article linked comparing the system vs system ( the two laptop ) and CPU vs CPU, the two chip. I felt both of them are misguided. On System level it completely ignore the thermal dissipation which is the limiting factor. You could have fitted a GTX 3080 within a 20W cooling allowance and it will show M1 Max winning in every GPU benchmarks. On the CPU level comparing the TDP of both SoC completely neglect the design choice and components inside SoC. The 100W M1 Max includes NPU, Media Engine, 8 Channel ( Or 16 depending how you want to count them ) memory controller, SSD Controller, FPGA and GPU. It doesn't make sense to compare to i9-12900HK only on CPU and then use the total chip TDP. And then there is the often repeated MultiCore performance( both on Android, and on PC with AMD CPU ). It is a useless number without knowing the power and core number. MSM likes to throw this number out without giving any context.
- runeks 5y ago
  > The 100W M1 Max includes NPU, Media Engine, 8 Channel ( Or 16 depending how you want to count them ) memory controller, SSD Controller and GPU. It maxes out at 40W, not 100W (according to the Anandtech measurement).
  - ksec 5y ago
    I am sure the 40W is CPU only, excluding other part of the SoC. The M1 Max GPU alone could push to 60W.
    - runeks 5y ago
      No, they measure it at the wall minus idle usage: https://www.anandtech.com/show/17024/apple-m1-max-performance-review/3 https://www.anandtech.com/show/17024/apple-m1-max-performanc... But you’re right that this is not with the GPU loaded.
dvhh 5y ago
I would think that speed would come 5th in my list of desirable feature in a laptop 1. portability 2. battery lifetime 3. cost 4. connectivity So Intel bragging for speed with such higher consumption and dedicated GPU (as opposed to integrated one). Maybe I have some niche use
- mettamage 5y ago
  Laptops are on a spectrum IMO. You can buy 5kg machines because you expect them to move them once every 2 months. You can buy a MacBook Air because you want to watch a show while cooking. These are the situations I have encountered.
  - dvhh 5y ago
    at least the alder lake option (+RTX) do offer some option to be used as a slow cooking pad
pmarreck 5y ago
Nobody cares, x86_64 is a dead API walking
paines 5y ago
Yeah, the M1 is fast and does not get loud when doing heavy tasks BUT the whole system needs polishing by Apple. Last night i brew installed haskell-stack (HEAD) which would compile the whole thing. It takes quite some time and while doing so I was watching a show with Quicktime. The sound would skip every now and then like it was in the early 90ies with Linux and Sound. That was quite irritating and annoying. (14'' M1 Pro)

225 points by kofejnik 5y ago

Even if it is faster than the M1, I'm done with Intel. The M1 is fast enough for my uses and there needs to be more disruption within the consumer chip market. I've been using ThinkPads with Intel CPU's for at least 15 years. My next laptop will be something with an M1 or better.

yeetaccount4 5y ago

dang 5y ago
We've banned this account for repeatedly breaking the site guidelines. Please see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30106519 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30106519. (I'm just posting this here to increase the odds that you see this, since the comment I replied to at that link is already a few days old.)
- yeetaccount4 5y ago

bashtoni 5y ago

Whilst consuming over 100 watts versus ~40 watts for the M1 max.

dijit 5y ago

3.5%-5% increase in performance at more than double the wattage, for a chip that is not in consumers hands against a chip that basically hasn't changed and was released 14 months ago~ This is not the victory that the title implies. It's also a _little_ bit funny that the i9 laptop was double the price, given people usually rant loudly about how expensive Apple computers are.

chii 5y ago
the fact is, apple hardware is not _that_ expensive relative to what you get for the money. Their supply chain is super optimized, and it's hard to beat them on price if a competitor decides to try (at the same quality that is).
- fartcannon 5y ago
  Yeah but it's locked down, unupgradable future e-waste.
  - crims0n 5y ago
    I would argue the opposite, still using my 2012 15” MacBook Pro… a decade later. Go to Walmart and look at the laptops on display, and tell me any of those are capable lasting near a decade.
    - addicted 5y ago
      That’s not true of the current Macs though. I still have a 2011 era MacBook that I can use, and was very pleasant to use until an OS update a couple of years ago. But that was because I was able to upgrade the RAM, the SSD, and replace the battery. None of those things are possible with macs from the last few years, so their longevity is much more likely to resemble phones than older macs.
      - BoorishBears 5y ago
        The secondary market simply doesn't agree with the weird obsession with calling Apple's hardware future e-waste just because you can't change out an SSD. Mac hardware holds value because it's well built, supported for a long time, has specs that are enough for a wide range of users... - For every power user running through battery cycles every day, there's people who just need a solid well built machine and won't feel the need to upgrade just because their machine gets less battery life, or a given IDE needs more RAM. Those people don't replace hardware because it's broken, they replace it because it feels old. Design wise, materials wise, etc. Not having crummy bloatware slowly accreting gigabytes of junk and a dozen extra startup items. Compare a sub $1000 M1 Air to any other sub $1000 laptop coming out today. You'd be incredibly hard pressed to find anything even half as well designed... that's how you get people to keep their hardware.

RandomBK 5y ago

> During the Cinebench R23 multi-core test, the Alder Lake laptop was consistently in the 100-watt range, [...] M1 Max’s power draw was 39.7 watts Ouch. > MSI GE76 Raider got 6 hours of offline video playback, a far cry from the MacBook Pro’s 17 hours. Double ouch. That's a huge gap, and 6 is low even in absolute terms. It's still a nice beefy chip, but still a far cry from the engineering marvel that Apple pulled off with the M1

_joel 5y ago
About twice the price too.
friedman23 5y ago
100 watts, so basically I have no reason to use this over a desktop. The battery life on the m1 macbooks is a game changer. I don't need more power out of my laptop I need it to be cool to the touch and last at least 9 hours with normal usage.
- philistine 5y ago
  With those laptops, we're back to the days of the luggables. It's a desktop you can carry, with some caveats in terms of performance related to the choice of parts. Apple is truly playing a different game.
  - theshrike79 5y ago
    Apple in-housing their chip design was a brilliant move. The A-series processors were a good indication what was coming up, but still the M1 blew me away. Still waiting to see what they'll do with Mac Pro + M-series. Do they go for a M2 or just slap a dozen M1s in parallel =)
gnufied 5y ago
With RTX 3080 Ti though. So yeah - I don't think it can match Apple M1 efficiency but reviews of P-series and U-series Alder Lake mobile CPUs are going to be interesting and what I am looking forward to.

xt00 5y ago

Yea the old narrative of "arm is power efficient, but doesn't actually run real desktop level stuff at that power level" is pretty dead at this point.. it now runs desktop level stuff at 3x lower power than intel's latest chips.. and the potential for apple's chips to keep improving at that same power envelope is definitely there.. so...

loeg 5y ago
Yeah, ARM is fine, as long as Mac meets your needs. No other ARM is close, and as a PC hardware platform, it’s still a giant pain compared to x86.
- MBCook 5y ago
  Seems like Graviton may be there, but of course Amazon isn’t going to sell those to anyone.
  - klelatti 5y ago
    No but Graviton is a modified Neoverse which others do sell - eg Ampere
- terafo 5y ago
  If there was a way to put Altra Max into PC, it would rip and tear threadripper apart.
mhh__ 5y ago
The ARM ISA are ARM as implemented by a team with decades of low power chip design expertise is possibly not the same thing. There probably is a quantifiably larger (than for raw performance) perf/watt tax with X86, but on the same process I'm not convinced it's all that huge. Intel were resting on their laurels for way too long. They've risen to the challenge rather than started panic-selling (give up on process), so exciting times are ahead I hope.
baq 5y ago
everybody loves the standard ARM firmware, BIOS and bootloader. right? right...?

sydthrowaway 5y ago

Dumb question, but whats the engineering principle behind higher performance when increasing power usage? Is it because pipelines are clocked faster?

jeffbee 5y ago
Higher clocks of the same part always draw more power, more than proportionally to the increase in clock speed because the voltage in the core also needs to increase to reach the higher clock.
AtlasBarfed 5y ago
I would guess it is some combination of: - longer pipelines - more silicon dedicated to speculative execution for more Instruction Level Parallelism - bigger caches - More analysis of incoming instruction stream to get more ILP and out of order execution But yeah, more clock is more power is more heat.
jagger27 5y ago
I'm not sure if I'm reading your question correctly, but the general idea behind running really hot and fast is to get tasks done more quickly and return to a lower power state. The "big" cores of chips like the M1 are meant to run "bursty" workloads, where as the the "little" cores are better lightweight longer running tasks (and also take up much less die space, which is another major factor).
wmf 5y ago
For transistors, power = frequency x voltage^2 x capacitance and since voltage is proportional to frequency it means power ~= frequency^3. That's why Alder Lake is quite efficient at low clocks but crazy power hungry when you let it turbo.
renewiltord 5y ago
Not sure at what level you want the answer and others are answering at other layers so I'll cover this one. Ultimately, the faster clock means you're discharging and charging things at the gate level more often. Changing this state expends energy. More changing, more energy used per unit time, more power necessary.

dinvlad 5y ago

They should change the title to "slightly faster at massively larger TDP"

jeffbee 5y ago
Peak performance is still interesting, no matter what power it draws. Keep in mind that if Apple could make their thing faster by cranking up the TDP, they absolutely would do so, at least in the MacBook Pro, Mac mini, and iMac where it hardly matters, if not in the Air. And perhaps they will do so in a future revision. We're due for new parts from Apple pretty soon.
MBCook 5y ago
The original title has an asterisk on the end. It seems to have been stripped at some point.

justinzollars 5y ago

The impressive feature of Apple Silicon is its energy efficiency. I have both a Linux laptop and apple laptop - The Intel Linux system eats battery. At times a full charge lasts only an hour; my apple on the other hand lasts all day.

sys_64738 5y ago

Performance Per Watt matters to Intel except when it doesn't. But really when you have to dissipate so much heat then the chip will be throttled. Apple's ARM chips are only getting started.

rvz 5y ago
Exactly. Apple is not even trying and Intel only just caught up. This year, they will find out that the M2 will set them back another 2 years.
- schleck8 5y ago
  > This year, they will find out that the M2 will set them back another 2 years. Luckily there will be the new zen 4 apus to wipe the floor with them

p1necone 5y ago

A lot of people are misinterpreting the results here (understandably, the article is pretty bad). They're benchmarking the CPU, but measuring the power draw of a whole laptop - including a dedicated 3080ti GPU which will still be drawing a decent amount of power even at idle. This benchmark is useful for measuring the speed and power draw of /this specific laptop/ vs an m1 MacBook, but not so much this new i9 in general. Laptop CPU performance also varies massively even across the exact same chip depending on thermal design, so this chip on average could potentially be either much slower or much faster than this benchmark suggests.

MBCook 5y ago
I’m guessing this is the first laptop Anandtech could get their hands on with this new chip. That said I’ve been out of the PC space for quite a while. Do mobile discrete GPUs greatly draw much power when mostly idle (such as general desktop work)? Did others give up on switching the discrete GPU on and off a needed as Apple used to do (and gave up on IIRC)?
- p1necone 5y ago
  I believe there are laptops you can buy that do that well, but it's not universal. Software support in Windows and Linux for swapping between a low power integrated GPU and a dedicated one on demand was rather spotty last time I had a system like that, but things might have changed since then (~6 years ago).
  - MBCook 5y ago
    I had one of the Apple ones and while it worked well the software was spotty there too. It tried to guess when the discrete was needed but turned it on far too often. Which quickly made it hot and killed the battery. Since I rarely gamed I ended up using a 3rd party utility to force the discrete GPU off 98% of the time and the laptop was much better for it. I understand why Apple did that (power draw when GPU on) and why they gave up (didn’t work well at all).
- skavi 5y ago

victorronin 5y ago

I switched about half a year ago from a MacBook Pro with an Intel processor to MacBook Pro with an M1 processor. My overall impression was "when the hell will it run out of power"? I spent the whole working day (without a charger) and it was still at 60%, while I was constantly stressed before when I had to do something without a charger for more than 3-4 hours. I don't care what any test, but tripling battery life with no visible performance degradation is a huge win in my book.

MBCook 5y ago
I replaced an older MBP with the M1 air. It ran circles around the old machine despite being the lowest spec. Battery is light years ahead. And it doesn’t even have a fan. So it’s dead silent. Never gets hot unlike the old Intel. There isn’t any mechanical component to fail except the hinge and the keyboard. I was worried I might regret not waiting for the higher spec M1s. Now that just seems totally unnecessary for me. PS: Work later gave me a high spec 2019 Intel MBP. It’s slower, louder, and much hotter than my Air. And at least 2.5x the price. Amazing.
- ramijames 5y ago
  I had a 2019 Intel MBP. I hated that machine with a vengeance. It was always hot, and because of that always throttled. I live in a hot place (Israel) and during the summer of 2021 the heat caused a massive expansion of the battery which destroyed the laptop. I went for an M1 in late 2021 after using a Windows machine for a few months and hating every moment of it. The M1 is simply incomparable. Fast. Silent. It feels futuristic.
Gatsky 5y ago
I don’t find the same. Chrome seems to eat the battery a lot in my experience.
- Multiplayer 5y ago
  I deeply regret getting only 16gb ram in my air for exactly this reason.

gnufied 5y ago

I know everyone is going to jump the gun and declare how mediocre Intel's offerings are in terms of power efficiency but lets not forget that this Laptop is also running RTX 3080Ti and historically more 5% performance on Alder Lake CPUs requires somehow way more power. Same thing happened during 12900K reviews. IMO - it would be interesting to see benchmark of P and U series Laptops. Honestly I do not think they are going to beat Apple M1 yet - but having a 14 or 10 core CPUs in <45w envelop will be interesting. I do not think Intel is even after Apple yet but they look to have caught up and surpassed AMD with this release for sure. For enthusiast in me - who likes a Laptop that can run Linux without problems, an all Intel 14core Laptop with <45w power budget will be great.

teaearlgraycold 5y ago
> I do not think Intel is even after Apple yet but they look to have caught up and surpassed AMD with this release for sure. Such a beautiful sentence to read. Love the actual competition these days.
tehbeard 5y ago
> I do not think Intel is even after Apple yet but they look to have caught up and surpassed AMD with this release for sure. Hmmm, as I've said before on other reviews around 12th gen, it feels like they've just pulled some levers around the power/thermal envelope being targeted (atleast on i9s?). Not really much more they can squeeze out of it that way... I'd love to see some competition, but this feels like such a short term way to get "back in the game".
sid-ant 5y ago
There is no Intel 14core laptop with <45w power budget at the frequencies this benchmark was performed. i9-12900HK consumes 115W of Turbo Power (PL2) [1] At 45W it can only do 2.5Ghz ( literally half ) on P cores and 1.8Ghz on E cores. It would be really interesting to see how this processor works with TB disabled which is really easy thing to do. [1] https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/docs/processors/core/12th-gen-core-mobile-processors-brief.html https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/docs/proces...

ggm 5y ago

You kind-of want this to be true, in the sense that if there isn't incremental improvement in a later product, something is wrong with VLSI design. That said, it's always interesting to look at why things are faster. More interesting than just being faster. If (eg) Intel are doing something smart in L1 cache, or ensuring no stalls, it would be cool if its applicable to ARM derived hardware. And if not, it would be cool to see how it maxes out, and how a future ARM tick-tock response in time shows benefits in different spaces. Also, this at LEAST a 2D cost/benefit matrix now. Speed+Power. Sometimes, no point being fastest if it costs more and your battery runs out faster. Remember Apple puts the M1 in portable units, where power/battery is a significant "feature" behind the purchase. Yes, I run my apple mostly plugged in. The time I get off-plug is huge. Faster intel which drains me on a flight isn't a plus.

DimmieMan 5y ago

This focus on raw performance makes sense when comparing desktop workstations but for laptops it misses the point and I hope it goes out of fashion. My MacBook Air runs Jetbrains + a couple containers just fine for almost a couple of work days on battery. Is this i9 faster? Yes but at a 6 hour battery life and 2.9Kg of weight it might as well be a desktop (just save money and buy/build a better desktop or get a console until PC parts are cheaper again). e: a cursory look suggests that laptop is also around $800 (AUD) more expensive than the (complete overkill for most) M1 it's comparing to, this is absolutely not a win.

vmception 5y ago
My M1 Max has insane battery life! I already take it for granted but I was just thinking about it the other day.
- MBCook 5y ago
  When I first got my M1 air I had it charged all the way and then had to put it aside for a few days. It wasn’t plugged in. I came back and it had lost like 3%. My Intel Mac it replaced would have used up most of not all of its battery. And that’s to say nothing of the crazy battery life in use.
BeefWellington 5y ago
> his focus on raw performance makes sense when comparing desktop workstations but for laptops it misses the point and I hope it goes out of fashion. > a cursory look suggests that laptop is also around $800 (AUD) more expensive than the (complete overkill for most) M1 it's comparing to, this is absolutely not a win. Regarding both points, the i9 laptop they tested has a 3080Ti in it, which would account for both the price difference and power draw just on its own. Even in CPU-only tests just having the discrete GPU on will chew power. The article is making a poor comparison here: The customer of the M1 Max is not going to be the same target customer of the MSI Raider series. These are not in any way comparable laptops. We'll have to see what happens when someone gets to test a business-targeted Dell or Lenovo system with the Alder Lake CPUs. The M1 will no doubt win the iGPU tests but power consumption will be a more interesting measure.

tims33 5y ago

Hopefully this turns into a situation where consumers and technologists are the winners. Pat Gelsinger was pretty clear on how he felt about the situation with Apple when he joined Intel and it seems clear we'll see Intel continue to improve. Ultimately this competition should product better products and better prices.

MBCook 5y ago
It’s always great to have someone come in and give the market leader a good kick in the ass. Causes things to improve so much faster than they would have otherwise. Remember what AMD releasing the Hammer/Athlon64 architecture did to Intel? Got them off the P4 and eventually lead to the far faster and more efficient Core2 series.
- BeefWellington 5y ago
  The Ryzen series seems to have done that for Intel too recently. I'm hopeful that this new split-core design Intel is going with pays dividends for them. As a consumer it's good to have robust competition.

johnnyAghands 5y ago

Click bait -- per watt ftw

snowwrestler 5y ago

Imagine going back 10 or 15 years and telling everyone that in 2022 it is newsworthy when an Intel laptop chip is actually faster than an Apple Mac chip. I feel like most folks would have thought it sounded like bad Apple fan fiction.

johnklos 5y ago

Hold on - it's 2022, and an extremely high end $4000 laptop with the latest Intel CPU and an NVIDIA 3080Ti comes with a display that's... 1080 resolution? My 2008 17" MacBook Pro has a screen that's 1920 x 1200. My iPhone 6+ is 1920 x 1080. What am I missing? Is the non-Apple world really fine with stagnant resolutions?

neogodless 5y ago
> Is the non-Apple world really fine with stagnant resolutions? Exactly one specific version of one exact laptop has 1080p, and you jump to that conclusion? You are missing 99.999% of the picture here!
- MBCook 5y ago
  It’s one laptop. But it’s not a $350 laptop. It’s $4000. It has the top of the line Intel chip and (what I believe) is the top of the line GPU out now. If any laptop was going to have a good screen I’d think it was this one. Nope. $1100 Air has a better screen.
  - neogodless 5y ago
    > If any laptop was going to have a good screen I’d think it was this one. Well no... they put a very fast (high refresh) gaming screen in a gaming laptop. If you want QHD or 4K screens, they are out there. That's not... more than a Google away. So it's a really bad assumption to make. Here, first google result for "Intel 4K laptop", it's $1500. https://www.bestbuy.com/site/asus-zenbook-flip-15-q538ei-15-6-touch-screen-laptop-intel-core-i7-16gb-memory-gtx1650ti-max-q-1tb-ssd-grey/6436221.p?skuId=6436221 https://www.bestbuy.com/site/asus-zenbook-flip-15-q538ei-15-... Your faulty logic was disproved.
    - MBCook 5y ago
      According to The Verge there is another configuration of this machine with double the RAM and a 4K 240Hz for the same price. Why in the world would you want a 1080p display just to get an extra 120 FPS? Even if you can perceive that difference (which I kind of doubt) you’re not going to get rates that high with your settings up high anyway. In The Verge’s tests only the old CS:GO got above 150 (it got over 400!). “ In conclusion, putting a 1080p screen on this system is like sticking an MLB player in a Little League game. Sure, he’s gonna look impressive, but what is the point? These are 4K chips, and I’m not just referring to the price of this unit.”

jtian 5y ago

For sure, it's not honorable to beat M1 Max (or M1 Pro, as they share exactly the same CPU part) at high wattage. I am genuinely curious if someone can verify the 35w-case (see https://www.zdnet.com/article/ces-2022-intel-says-it-has-a-mobile-i9-that-will-beat-the-apple-m1-max/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/ces-2022-intel-says-it-has-a-m...). Also, it may derail: it seems that we could never have all good things at the same time: 1. Apple and NVIDIA: previously, what do you expect when two control freaks meet? And now Apple has its in-house GPU, we will never see an all-around Mac anyway. 2. Even if Intel makes M*-like chips, its customer (OEMs) won't afford it anyway: 200 GB/s memory for CPU is simply server grade (e.g., the memory bandwidth is like Xeon Sapphire Rapids'), too expensive for consumer use. (edited for formatting)

1024core 5y ago

FTA: > In the end, though, comparing Alder Lake and the M1 ends up being a simple academic exercise that doesn’t amount to much. There you have it.

Thorrez 5y ago

Are these benchmarks on the M1 compiled to ARM or x86?

nikolay 5y ago

Faster, yeah, slightly... but at what price?!

marricks 5y ago

Intel normally releases lowest end chips first (maybe because it's easier to get volume of them because of binning) but this year flipped that so we all talk about the highest benchmark chips first. Yes, that means chips meant to be paired with dedicated GPU. Gives one the impression these are the most favorable comparisons with some benchmarks better than Apple. Then when we get to the lower wattage chips Intel will be able to claim they have just as good power draw too. I'm not sure they'd do that inversion if they knew their chips were overall better.

neogodless 5y ago

Whether you're an Intel fan, an Apple fan, or just anti-Intel (or anti-Apple), I feel like there's not much effort here to see the complete picture. First, yes Apple Silicon M1 (any variety) is, with 100% certainty more efficient than Intel's Alder Lake 12th generation CPUs. And the performance is often better than Intel's best for specific workloads. Second, you can look at just a few benchmarks and pick winners. You can look at maximum power draw and pick losers. Or you can look at a lot of other things. For one, Alder Lake is a big improvement over their previous "10nm" aka "Intel 7" CPUs, both in performance, and in efficiency. But they were coming from a pretty big deficit. Second, Alder Lake seems to be able to draw a lot of power out of the box. But, it also performs almost as well when limited somewhat. For more interesting benchmarks, see how it does limited to 75W[0]. If you want great battery life, and MacOS works for you, there's no reason to join this debate. You win, you get the M1 and all the goodness that comes with it. If you've got a very specific job that requires maximum performance, you really need to see how the performance is on that task, and whether you can afford to trade off on battery life, or just need limited portability. Of course MacWorld is not incentivized to color Intel in the best light, and neither any Mac faithful. But it's also weird to ignore the massive improvements here over Intel's 11th gen. It's technology and engineering, and it's a better showing than we saw out of Intel for quite some time. They spent the early part of the previous decade making tiny improvements to their same 4 core CPUs over and over. Then they spent the second half making mistakes in their process nodes. Alder Lake isn't perfect, but I appreciate it for what it is. [0] https://youtu.be/Ur3Y2vxpTWo?t=345 https://youtu.be/Ur3Y2vxpTWo?t=345

walrus01 5y ago

An MSI GE76 is significantly fatter, heavier and hotter than a macbook pro 14 inch. It's not a fair comparison at all. This is comparing a thin/light laptop with a designed-for-purpose gaming laptop. Here's an image showing the large heat exhaust vents. https://storage-asset.msi.com/global/picture/image/feature/nb/GE/GE76-Raider/images/gallery-id02.png https://storage-asset.msi.com/global/picture/image/feature/n...

gigel82 5y ago

Don't know first-hand about Alder Lake, but I have an Asus laptop running an AMD 5900HS CPU (with a 3070 GPU), and an M1 Max for work. I can buy 3 Asus laptops for the price of the Macbook, and despite that I still prefer working with it. Full disclosure, we're mostly a Windows shop so I'm very rarely using the Macbook for actual development (mostly just doing builds and running tests on it, otherwise just use it on a second monitor for browsing and Spotify :)). Yes, it's subjective; I'm sure in some purely synthetic benchmark the Macbook wins, but in real life they're pretty close. And if I were actually lugging it around, I may prefer the lighter / quieter Macbook (but likely remote-ing into some Windows box or running Parallels would hurt perf enough to hate it). I can also game on the Asus too :)

watersb 5y ago

The Alder Lake monster review on AnandTech is fun. A desktop replacement laptop: ten pounds! 150 Watts! nVidia RTX! Whips and chains! https://www.anandtech.com/show/17223/intel-alder-lake-h-core-i9-12900hk-review-msi-raider-ge76-goes-hybrid https://www.anandtech.com/show/17223/intel-alder-lake-h-core... It's almost exactly three times as fast in CineBench as my MacBook Air, and cost about 3x as much, weight also about 3x. A useless comparison, but kind of funny to imagine rolling in there with three MacBook Airs, set up some distributed load network, and claiming victory. The Alder Lake box has 100% more CUDA. (I couldn't figure out the idle power draw from the review, AnandTech publishes their raw data, so maybe it's in there somewhere. https://www.anandtech.com/bench https://www.anandtech.com/bench )

midrus 5y ago

(*) This processor might require a nuclear power plant attached to your laptop.

midrus 5y ago

It is funny and sad at the same time to see how desperate Intel is about the fact they're not building the most powerful processors anymore.

AceJohnny2 5y ago

It amuses me how the decades-long market leader is scrambling to recover from the blow Apple dealt them. What could have been if the Itanium had worked out. If they had done something good with XScale. If, if...

andreime 5y ago
From the blow AMD dealt them.

watersb 5y ago

Also, on my MacBook tonight, the CPU core temperatures reported via Macs Fan Control were ambient temperature. Which seems kinda crazy. It was idling the CPUs, as it performs the most important task of the hour: downloading another 2GB system update.

synaesthesisx 5y ago

Somehow I can almost guarantee the M-series will outperform this in real-world usage.

accountLost 5y ago

This is a 10nm processor, right ? So a 10mn processor can be as fast as a 5mn processor but at more than double the voltage ? Not so bad. What would be the perf of this processor with TSMC 5nm tech ?

sroussey 5y ago
Those numbers are not comparable. In fact, these days they are meaningless. Intel used to measure a part of a transistor. Worked well until the geometry of the transistor changed and there wasn’t something comparable. So they chose something different that kinda looked right. TSMC chose something else. These numbers are meaningless. Mostly all the fabs really are talking about transistors per mm. But if you look closely, logic density is changing at a different rate than other things like those that make up sram (particularly TSMC). Those caches are increasing size because 1) new designs want more MB and 2) sram density is not improving as well as logic density so caches are taking up more space in a relative basis if all you do is a die shrink.
- accountLost 5y ago
  Thank you for your answer. I got instantly buried below the "bad perf per watt" comments and thought nobody would see my question.

ksec 5y ago

1. The M1 / M1 Pro / Max Single Core Max out at around 5W. On TSMC 5nm, at 3.2Ghz. 2. The AlderLake i9-12900HK, is on Intel 7nm ( Or Intel7 ), runs with a a maximum of 5Ghz. My guess the power for single core on this chip is anywhere from 15W to 20W. 3. The Single core performance between the two are about ~5% to 20% if you are SIMD heavy. There are lots of people in thread and the article linked comparing the system vs system ( the two laptop ) and CPU vs CPU, the two chip. I felt both of them are misguided. On System level it completely ignore the thermal dissipation which is the limiting factor. You could have fitted a GTX 3080 within a 20W cooling allowance and it will show M1 Max winning in every GPU benchmarks. On the CPU level comparing the TDP of both SoC completely neglect the design choice and components inside SoC. The 100W M1 Max includes NPU, Media Engine, 8 Channel ( Or 16 depending how you want to count them ) memory controller, SSD Controller, FPGA and GPU. It doesn't make sense to compare to i9-12900HK only on CPU and then use the total chip TDP. And then there is the often repeated MultiCore performance( both on Android, and on PC with AMD CPU ). It is a useless number without knowing the power and core number. MSM likes to throw this number out without giving any context.

runeks 5y ago
> The 100W M1 Max includes NPU, Media Engine, 8 Channel ( Or 16 depending how you want to count them ) memory controller, SSD Controller and GPU. It maxes out at 40W, not 100W (according to the Anandtech measurement).
- ksec 5y ago
  I am sure the 40W is CPU only, excluding other part of the SoC. The M1 Max GPU alone could push to 60W.
  - runeks 5y ago
    No, they measure it at the wall minus idle usage: https://www.anandtech.com/show/17024/apple-m1-max-performance-review/3 https://www.anandtech.com/show/17024/apple-m1-max-performanc... But you’re right that this is not with the GPU loaded.

dvhh 5y ago

I would think that speed would come 5th in my list of desirable feature in a laptop 1. portability 2. battery lifetime 3. cost 4. connectivity So Intel bragging for speed with such higher consumption and dedicated GPU (as opposed to integrated one). Maybe I have some niche use

mettamage 5y ago
Laptops are on a spectrum IMO. You can buy 5kg machines because you expect them to move them once every 2 months. You can buy a MacBook Air because you want to watch a show while cooking. These are the situations I have encountered.
- dvhh 5y ago
  at least the alder lake option (+RTX) do offer some option to be used as a slow cooking pad

pmarreck 5y ago

Nobody cares, x86_64 is a dead API walking

paines 5y ago

Yeah, the M1 is fast and does not get loud when doing heavy tasks BUT the whole system needs polishing by Apple. Last night i brew installed haskell-stack (HEAD) which would compile the whole thing. It takes quite some time and while doing so I was watching a show with Quicktime. The sound would skip every now and then like it was in the early 90ies with Linux and Sound. That was quite irritating and annoying. (14'' M1 Pro)