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Can Intel finally beat ARM on performance per Watt?
- varispeed 2mo agoWhy people are excited about Intel barely matching already outdated CPUs of the competition? Shouldn't we be concerned that the company instead of aiming for the leap is producing legacy hardware destined for landfill? Wake me up when Intel produces something groundbreaking.
- margalabargala 2mo agoComments like this one remind me of all the people saying "China can't invent things, they can only copy the US" 20 years ago. Like, we're comparing a new Dell to a Mac released only 4 months ago. How did you feel about the Mac Neo then, and now? Is it also legacy hardware destined for the landfill?
- geerlingguy 2mo agoNot only that, the efficiency (FP64, HPL) is also beating all the M4/M3/M2/M1 systems I've tested besides the M4 Mac mini: https://github.com/geerlingguy/top500-benchmark#results https://github.com/geerlingguy/top500-benchmark#results I think the bigger news is Intel's made a chip that isn't just pushing clocks to hit some performance number, they've actually tuned clocks for efficiency... which also leads to much better battery life. And the fan on the system in the original article[1] also allows the Intel system to run substantially faster for longer tasks (where the Neo thermally saturates and has to stay throttled). (The iGPU is another matter... sadly still a bit lacking.) I'm hoping Intel makes a follow-up to the N100-series chips with just four of their newer low power E-cores. [1] https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2026/excited-for-intel-efficiency/ https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2026/excited-for-intel-eff...
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- GeekyBear 2mo agoEfficiency is one thing. Efficiency and performance is another. We've long known that pushing clock speeds results in diminishing efficiency, so it's about time we see Intel stop pushing the clocks (and power) so hard that the chip melts down and the battery drains quickly.
- mr_toad 2mo ago“But they can’t match Intels performance” used to be the rejoinder of the Intel crowd. Now we’ve come full circle.
- GeekyBear 2mo agoUntil Intel is capable of making a fanless laptop chip that also has industry leading single core performance, they aren't in the same ballpark.
- bigyabai 2mo agoGetting sustained single-core performance requires you to push the P-cores to junction temp. It's only efficient in bursty workloads, under load it will go back to Intel-tier efficiency.
- AnthonyMouse 2mo agoIntel's actual problem was that their process fell behind TSMC's. That meant competing on performance per watt was out of the question and the best they could do was turn up the clock speed and try to stay on top for performance. If they've managed to fix their process then they don't have to do that anymore.
- GeekyBear 2mo agoThey have finally prioritized buying leading edge Fab technology over stock buybacks, so their design team finally has a chance.
- lowbloodsugar 2mo agoOk so Intel managed to make a 20W TDP chip that gets 6.x Gflops/W. Call me back when they’ve got a chip that still gets 6.x Gf/W with a 200W 1,200Gflop package like the M3 next on your list. This little fellow is only 50% more efficient than my aging M1 Max! It’s great that they are making progress. Competition is good. They certainly need good news right now. I have exactly one intel cpu in my house in a NUC I got off eBay and it’s about to be replaced by my M4 mini. My other x86 are Zen (threadripper, 5800x3d, 5950s).
- geerlingguy 2mo agoYeah, the first step is they realize pushing clocks is not the most important thing; second step is to apply that to other chips they make too! I want to see more desktop and server chips getting closer to Arm efficiency.
- lostlogin 2mo ago> I have exactly one intel cpu in my house in a NUC I got off eBay and it’s about to be replaced by my M4 mini. Do some tests pre and post upgrade. It’s ridiculous how efficient the mini is. My power usage is about 1/12 what it was with a Nuc.
- dochtman 2mo agoI don’t think it’s completely unfair to say that the Neo is based on a chip that was first announced in Sep 2024 while the Intel chip is from Apr 2026. Also, I think the battery life most people are practically interested in is more like running (close to) idle and less like the number of Watts spent when running maxed out, and I wouldn’t be surprised if Arm chips still win on that metric…
- MBCook 2mo agoPlus it’s a phone chip. Yeah it’s used in the Neo but it’s no M5. It’s good Intel got to this point, but you can’t declare them tied with Apple. They qualified for the real race, which us great, but they're not going to win with that chip.
- hamandcheese 2mo agoDoesn't it being a phone chip make the efficiency claim more impressive, not less? Moreover, from tfa: > This Dell also beats out both M4 and M3 Mac Studios, only failing to the M4 Mac Mini at 7.57 Gflops/W.
- MBCook 2mo agoI haven’t followed the PC chip business anywhere near as much as I used to around the turn of the millennium. I was under the impression Intel actually made a few chips that could go quite low power. The problem was their performance sucked. It’s good that this performs good and can go low power, but the big question to me is whether they can scale it up without it becoming a power sucking furnace. There’s no other comment somewhere in here, where someone is pointing out that that was in FP64, which is not something most people use. Especially people who are going to buy a computer like this. I suspect for me personally, integer use matters far, far, far more than anything else.
- Archit3ch 2mo ago> in FP64, which is not something most people use It's used in audio processing. But large DAW sessions need something beefier than both tested devices (Macbook Neo, XPS).
- re-thc 2mo ago> Comments like this one remind me of all the people saying "China can't invent things, they can only copy the US" 20 years ago. We still get these comments. Now about AI. China can only distill and are still years behind. Well well...
- oofbey 2mo agoReally curious to see how ByteDance’s 10T model works out.
- selectively 2mo ago[dead]
- throw-the-towel 2mo agoIf Intel is competitive with Apple again, this should be good for the customer.
- intrasight 2mo ago"competing" is not the same thing as "competitive". Apple is 1-2 years ahead. If they remain so indefinitely into the future then Intel is not competitive.
- mortsnort 2mo agoExcept Intel can run Linux. A powerful enough laptop with M efficiency that can run Linux is compelling for many laptop buyers, especially the HN crowd.
- intrasight 2mo agoTrue. I was referring only to the silicon. Apple's OS totally sucks. I can envision a day when Apple properly supports Linux. I cannot envision a day when their OS doesn't suck.
- bhouston 2mo agoThe improved efficiency is great! The Apple Neo was still 2x faster for graphics and around 1.4x faster for single core cpu. And remember the Apple Neo is running an iPhone CPU that is much slower than the M series. It is strange that this chip is so crazy efficient though. I would love to know the details of exactly why it is? It seems like some new tech or process? I do want 1.5x battery life for free out of my next laptop. Who wouldn’t?
- MBCook 2mo agoApple has been working ruthlessly on battery efficiency for a long time because of the phones and their tendency to minimize battery sizes on Macs for thinness. The exact design of the cores, how they’re scheduled, the way background stuff is handled on MacOS. All of it. The chips are made on a fantastic process too, but that alone isn’t it. For example they’ve been putting the ability to drop refresh rate really low when nothing changes to more and more of their machines. It could be that the Intel chip is close, IDK. But add in other motherboard components, the screen, the OS, the software and system libraries, all are optimized together to hit those numbers. And any of those alone or in combination could be part of the differences.
- oofbey 2mo agoI think the Top500 benchmark is biased here. It’s a supercomputing benchmark which means it’s going to heavily weight SIMD and float64 performance, which are things that rarely matter for everyday computing. SIMD has uses in the real world - image or video editing, data crunching, graphics. But consumers basically never use fp64 any more, and so many modern chips have next to zero performance on them. That could easily skew the numbers in intel’s favor.
- geerlingguy 2mo agoI run a number of other benchmarks for a better comparison (linked from my blog post: https://github.com/geerlingguy/sbc-reviews/issues/111 https://github.com/geerlingguy/sbc-reviews/issues/111). The Intel chip holds its own for multicore in less bursty workloads, where the fans help.
- anticorporate 2mo agoRather than the Hackaday article, which doesn't add anything to the original, here's Jeff's actual video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A2B7oI0FYqo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A2B7oI0FYqo and post: https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2026/excited-for-intel-efficiency/ https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2026/excited-for-intel-eff...
- e12e 2mo agoThank you - especially for linking the article.
- xnx 2mo agoSounds like a good option. Still having fans keeps it way behind the Neo in my mind.
- ben-schaaf 2mo agoGiven how appalling the thermal throttling behaviour is on the Neo - sustained workloads can lose up to 50% performance, making it substantially slower than an M1 Air - you should instead be asking for a fan in the Neo.
- xnx 2mo agoFans are a good addition if they only activate during peak load, but my experience with Dell is that the hardware and firmware design is so poor that the fans always operate at near full speed.
- aurareturn 2mo agoDid Jeff Geerling get paid to post misleading headlines and reviews on Intel vs Apple? He's basing this on his own "super computing benchmark" measuring only FP64 performance. Meanwhile, any normal person using these $600 laptops will never run FP64 supercomputing tasks on the CPU. He also only showed perf/watt in this one benchmark but skipped the fact that Apple Silicon is significantly faster. Obviously, all this efficiency is on the low end—the laptop only achieves a little over 120 Gflops, while Apple's faster M3 and M4 Macs are pushing through up to 1.2 Teraflops. I can't believe this crap is getting upvoted. Hopefully this guy loses all his credibility going forward. This kind of post is seriously misleading and smells like like an undisclosed sponsor review.
- dyauspitr 2mo agoWell, they beat even TSMC on performance so they’re at least halfway there.
- miladyincontrol 2mo agoIntel wins, in HPL FP64. Its a stretch to take a single metric and apply it's outcome broadly to the chip's general functionality. Especially when by large the A18 chip with half the power requirement beats it in almost every other benchmark.
- slashdave 2mo agoM4's GPU does not support 64 float. So, yeah. No hardware support, so what are you expecting? The fact that it comes close is pretty impressive.
- geerlingguy 2mo agoThese tests were done on the CPU cores, not on the GPU. In every test I ran the A18 chip blew past Intel's Core 5 on GPU performance. There were a series of other benchmarks too, but the Hackaday article only highlights HPL as that was the benchmark that changed my perspective on Intel a bit. This was the first X86 chip to trade blows in efficiency (and idle power draw) with Apple's M3/M4 (I don't have any M5 to test with right now).
- pertymcpert 2mo agoI really think you should use a more representative benchmark. Heck, even just take Chrome and run some browser benchmark on it like speedometer.
- geerlingguy 2mo agoI run a large number of benchmarks; the Hackaday article of course focuses on the headline findings, but you can see the rest here: https://github.com/geerlingguy/sbc-reviews/issues/111 https://github.com/geerlingguy/sbc-reviews/issues/111
- mmcnl 2mo agoYeah this is misleading cherrypicking. Also it's super slow. Not impressed with slow efficient chips. Anyone can make a chip efficient by reducing clock frequency and sacrificing performance in the process.
- WithinReason 2mo agoIf you normalise for both process node and clock speed, AMD and Apple are tied on single threaded perf/watt, and AMD Zen 5c cores have about a 12% perf/area advantage.
- aurareturn 2mo agoAbsolutely not true. Apple leads in IPC, perf/area in CPU, and raw performance. We already have TSMC N7, N5, N4 AMD vs Apple CPUs to compare.
- WithinReason 2mo agoI wasn't talking about any of those
- podocarp 2mo agoPlease clarify?
- WithinReason 2mo agonever mind, I messed up the math
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- KingMachiavelli 2mo agoA more accurate title is can Intel (Linux/Windows) beat Apple? If you don't want to run Windows, is there even a choice? My issue now with the non-Apple computers if you want to run Linux it's really hard to predict how awful Chromium/Firefox will be. My work Dell Laptop is only a 3 year old CPU with integrated GPU (and unused Nvidia GPU) but Chromium and Firefox are both slow as shit just loading pages like Slack and Outlook. Even resizing the browser windows seems 4-5x times slower than my M3 Macbook Air. Maybe this is strictly a Linux issue but it hardly matters when the Windows ecosystem is pretty stagnant, full of junk-ware, and software development is much, much better on Linux/MacOS.
- jgalt212 2mo agoMy servers run linux, my customers run windows, but if I run Mac that only adds to my complexity. So all our dev boxes run Linux.
- spockz 2mo agoI’m running CachyOS (based on arch) and it is blazing fast. Both with Firefox and Vivaldi. Especially compared to the windows install I used to have on the same machine. Or is your point only about windows?
- KingMachiavelli 2mo agoHmm, I'm using the CachyOS kernel but on NixOS. What CPU/GPU are you using? I tried using the flatpak Chromium in case it was some NixOS build optimization oddities but didn't see much of a difference.
- spockz 2mo agoI’m currently on a AMD 5900X with 9070 XT. Previously a 6700XT, didn’t make a difference in desktop only in games. Using KDE with Wayland. Recently I switched to the bore-lto flavour kernel as it seems to handle memory contention slightly better.
- hnuser123456 2mo ago
- ethin 2mo agoThis is interesting but what I would love to see is Mac M4/M5 performance (speed) on an Intel laptop CPU. I know that it will be really difficult to pull off (assuming it's achievable at all) given that Intel just makes the CPU and the computer manufacturers for PCs don't do the kind of tuning that Apple is able to do, but still, I can't help but hope that maybe it can be done somehow. Maybe even while making the machines still serviceable! (Yes yes, I know, but a man can dream...)
- 3eb7988a1663 2mo ago> no headphone jack I am fully old man screaming at the clouds here, but what does this cost for Dell to include? I insist on a wired headset - telecommunications already barely works, I don't want to add wireless+battery problems into the mix.
- 15155 2mo ago3.5mm TRS jacks might cost 10 cents to include and then hundreds of dollars to service when they break. The issue is not the BOM cost.
- Groxx 2mo agoWe've got laptops with modular USB-C ports that solve this effectively perfectly. An audio one would be even simpler. The only reason you don't see it everywhere is because they're being outrageously hostile to repairs, and choosing to charge you hundreds of dollars for repairs on a part that they know is easily broken.
- 15155 2mo agoWhy is anything modular a good solution over a USB-C DAC-containing dongle cable?
- Groxx 2mo agoModular ports are a physical disconnect between "thing that routinely experiences stresses and has a relatively short expected lifespan under heavy use" and "extremely expensive and long-lived motherboard", usually a separate circuit board connected by a ribbon cable. They serve a completely different purpose from a dongle that converts a common port to a less common one. Framework laptops have another decent strategy, where you've got on-motherboard ports that have relatively few usage cycles, and are protected from most forces because the easily-replaceable custom-dongle-squares are held in place quite securely. They take the damage, protecting the motherboard. And as long as the motherboard ports are still good, you can even forego the modular thing and just plug in directly if needed.
- amelius 2mo agoWhoever used the most recent TSMC node will have the best specs. My guess is that even the designs of the transistors and perhaps logic gates are IP blocks owned by TSMC and not whoever wants to get their chip fabricated.
- aurareturn 2mo agoThis isn't true because Apple's N5 CPUs are faster and more efficient than Intel's TSMC N3 CPUs (Lunar Lake).
- amelius 2mo agoI suppose in that case Intel tried to make its own transistors.
- kristianp 2mo agoNo headphone jack! Why Dell? The processor is a Intel Core 5 320 Wildcat lake, with 4 "low power efficient cores" and 2 non-hyperthreaded Performance-cores. It's variant of Panther Lake which has some models with Arc GPUs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panther_Lake_(microprocessor) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panther_Lake_(microprocessor) https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/sku/246018/intel-core-5-processor-320-6m-cache-up-to-4-60-ghz/specifications.html https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/sku/246018/...
- jeffbee 2mo agoIt's long been possible (since Alder Lake at the latest) to tune Intel CPUs for task energy consumption competitive with Apple Silicon, but bone-headed OEMs including Apple always tuned them the other way, wasting a lot of power for tiny performance gains. It is inappropriate to say that you evaluated the perf per watt on a Core Ultra 7 265K because what you really evaluated was how HP, Lenovo, or Dell configured that chip. But for years it has been the case that with one of the Atom variants (Gracemont, Skymont, ___mont) tuned to non-ridiculous scaling modes (capped at 2GHz, say) the energy story is quite good. The Apple platform does not have eager scaling and this is part of their efficiency story.
- aurareturn 2mo agoMax power Intel consumer chips are already losing to Apple chips in raw performance, especially ST. Tuning them for better perf/watt by turning down the Ghz would just make them even less competitive in performance. - Performance - Performance/watt - Die area These are the 3 things determine a competitive chip. You can increase perf/watt but decrease performance. You can increase performance by giving the chip a lot of cache and transistors but it's more costly to manufacture. The problem is that Intel chips are losing in all 3 areas simultaneously against Apple chips. They are slower, less efficient, and the CPU cores are bigger physically.
- bitwize 2mo agoBetteridge's Law of Headlines
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- lern_too_spel 2mo agoThis field (XPS 13 and Neo) includes the Chromebook Plus Spin 514 with Mediatek Kompanio Ultra inside, which is superior to both in performance and hardware (and default OS, IMHO) and sells for $100 less.
- aryonoco 2mo agoIntel’s low end SoCs are such an undervalued gem. A couple of years ago I got tired of dealing with OpenWRT and various Tomato based firmware or hunting down compatibility between ARM and MIPS based routers. I finally took the plunge and bought myself a mini pc with an Intel N100. The thing has 4 cores (no SMT), a 6W TDP and boosts to 3.4 GHz and can support 16GB of ram. The mini pc I bought cost me $200, includes the processor as well 4x Intel 10Gbps Ethernet ports. At 6W, it needs no fan, and the whole chassis is metal and specifically designed to act as a heatsink, which means 0 noise and 0 moving parts. I ran a power virus on it for a few hours to test the thermals, and on a warm day in Melbourne, after hours of having all 4 cores running full throttle, CPU temperature never exceeded 90 C and the chassis barely hit 55 C. The best thing about it? Full upstream support for any Linux distro and FreeBSD. No more wondering if this particular Broadcom chipset needs a weird binary blob, no more being hostage to an OEM and having to run old forked kernels. I installed OPNSense on it, VESA mounted it behind our TV, and it hasn’t been seen or heard since. Not only has it been the most reliable router I’ve ever had at home, it’s providing various other services such as DNS server, apt cache, WireGuard server and client etc for my homelab. I’ve been waiting for ARM to get here since ARMv8 was announced in 2011, but it just hasn’t happened. Long live x86.
- podocarp 2mo agoPersonally have the same experience too. I am tired trying to find out if the xyzPi of the day boards can do Linux. Vendors should also try harder. There are so many boards that release with half baked implementations or proprietary blobs. x86 always just works. Devices are also almost always just pcie devices even for those mini PCs with lots of interfaces. Compare to something like bananapi R4 that I think have some oddities with a mux chip not available in vanilla linux… It's also super easy to spec out your own devices in this regime on x86. There are mini itx boards with n100/n305 with pcie slots so you can add your own cards, and the n100 has a surprisingly number of available lanes for its small size. There just seems to be no viable "just works" solution in the below 10 or 20W range apart from raspberry pi, and Intel n100/n305.
- kvemkon 2mo ago> bought myself a mini pc with an Intel N100 Instead of Raspi I've got a N100 uATX mainboard with N100 (120 EUR). Fortunately it does work with normal 32GB DIMM (55 EUR, those were the days!). But I'm still missing a pico-PSU, which can be powered directly from 220V (for reasonable costs).
- bearjaws 2mo agoDepends on whether the OS actually puts the laptop or sleep or not.
- dimask 2mo agoNice and organised work! My only reservation wrt the core of it is that it tests the cpus on a matrix operations task, and power efficiency in this case refers specifically to doing matrix operations. This is fine if that's the kind of task one wants to optimise for, but it does not necessarily translate to general energy efficiency for a broader spectrum of tasks that most people may do most of the time. And thus, if one wants to optimise for matrix operations, wouldn't it make sense to use apple's accelerate framework instead of blis/openblas (I think you used blis?)? I compiled hpl to use accelerate [0] on my m1 max (macbook), and ran it with settings almost identical to the original m1 max settings [1]. I get 422 Gflops vs 264 Gflops in m1 max mac studio (docker) [2]. My average draw (using a wall power meter, but not interfaced with computer to keep a log, just me looking at it) is around 55-57W (probably less because it peaked at 57W but the last half was getting around 52W). With the most conservative estimate of 57W, this gave a 7.4 Gflops/W which is second place, just below the m4 mac mini in the benchmark table. The m1 max in the original did 4 Gflops/W (at 66W). So tbh I do not really trust the conclusion of the benchmark page, except if I miss sth. It is quite nice, organised work anyway. [0] https://github.com/tycho/hpl/blob/master/setup/Make.MacOSX_Accelerate https://github.com/tycho/hpl/blob/master/setup/Make.MacOSX_A... [1] I just fixed the p:q ratio, which was prob not really meant to be 1:10 there, I assume, also judging from the settings in the other tests. I put p=2,q=4. Also I was unable to put more than 8 processes in total. [2] The original m1 max benchmark: https://github.com/geerlingguy/top500-benchmark/issues/4 https://github.com/geerlingguy/top500-benchmark/issues/4
- geerlingguy 2mo agoCan you please post an issue on the repo? Long on my todo list has been trying to get the Mac tests more repeatable/consistent and optimized (always easier on Linux).
- dimask 2mo agoWill def do!
- lostmsu 2mo agoWhen you test matmul these days you want bf16 max. FP64 is a niche workload 100% unused by 95%+ users.
- JSR_FDED 2mo agoDoes it maintain the same performance when running only on battery?
- therealmarv 2mo agoIn Germany the Dell XPS 13 2026 is 56% more expensive (over 1000 Euros) than the MacBook Neo (below 700). So the claim does not hold World wide, maybe only in US on local prices.
- geerlingguy 2mo agoYeah, not sure why Dell has such a spread on US vs rest-of-world pricing here. I know some have mentioned the $699/$599 price could also change a bit in the US come November. The internal assembly and parts seem like they'd cost Dell a little more than Apple's cost building the Neo, so maybe in the US they're selling them closer to at cost, and subsidizing it with the Windows exclusivity and price elsewhere? Not sure, but it stinks the price only applies here. It's a good deal at $699. Harder to justify at $1,000+.
- redat00 2mo agoSeems like it's targeted at students. They're probably expecting to sell a bunch of them at the time of "back to school" and they'll increase the price after. At least for Europe, and more specifically France, laptop use in classrooms in high school, is still not a thing. So that would explain why they don't do it everywhere the same and the huge price difference.
- mmcnl 2mo agoEasy, it's priced much lower in the US on purpose so that reviewers will directly compare it with the Neo to get more favorable reviews, while in fact it should be compared to the Air from a price perspective (and then it will lose on everything big time except the 120Hz display). It's all misleading marketing. MacBooks simply have the best value proposition. Compared to the competition at similar price point they are much faster, have much better build quality, better displays, better battery life, less fan noise, etc. Also much higher resale value.
- bigyabai 2mo agoValue proposition is still subjective. Apple should be making money hand-over-fist from the AI boom, but Nvidia is the one that wooed over the datacenter with their high-performance ARM chipsets. Apple's unwillingness to support CUDA cost them a market that was worth almost $2-3 trillion, and forces local CoreML to compete with CUDNN in ways that it can never triumph. Macs are great if you want a Mac. If you want a flexible workstation, a gaming PC, a retrocomputing build, an inference server, a programming environment, or a headless VPS, macOS doesn't even attempt to cover your use-case. It's the reason why the Mac install base is still vying for pole position after 40 years of "you're holding it wrong" to their users.
- pjmlp 2mo ago> While you might think you need to code in Assembly or C to maximize those efficiency gains, your choice of language may not be as important as you think. Yep, and the linked article is also kind of interesting.