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Did 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 F

Did 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.

denismi 3mo ago
> This is like saying my Intel Pentium 3 matches Apple M5 in perf/watt ... if it was within orders of magnitude of being true, perhaps.
geerlingguy 3mo ago
No, this laptop was loaned to me for a couple weeks (it's boxed up and ready to ship back now), and I fully disclose any and all sponsorship (this was not sponsored in any way); see my policies here: https://github.com/geerlingguy/youtube#sponsorships https://github.com/geerlingguy/youtube#sponsorships Further, I'm basing my opinion on a number of benchmarks and power measurements besides just HPL. I just favor that because it's one of the few that push a CPU hard, fills system memory, and can't easily be gamed/made irrelevant with new architecture. The main point of my blog post is to say this is the first Intel chip that's even punched in the same weight class as any Apple Silicon, wrt efficiency. It quite surprised me.
- aurareturn 3mo ago
  This is your actual headline: "Intel just matched Apple Silicon. Seriously." You're basing the headline on a single FP64 test for a $600 laptop. Come on man. If your headline was being honest, it'd say "Apple A18 Pro is still 3-4x more efficient and significantly faster than Intel's low end chip in common tasks". If this isn't an undisclosed sponsored review, then it's just misleading clickbait for Youtube views. It's clearly working for you. You can do better.
  - geerlingguy 3mo ago
    I had three YouTube titles, this one got about 2x the watch time as the other two, so I let YT pick it. For technical readers, I write my blog posts. I don't have to (I lose money hosting that thing and all it's mostly just free training data for Anthropic, OpenAI, et all), but I enjoy writing, so I do it anyway. If you don't like the YT game, please subscribe to the blog's RSS feed. I much prefer text over video.
    - aurareturn 3mo ago
      Just because this title did the best doesn't make it not misleading. If you are a serious reviewer, it wouldn't have been an option in the first place. You can make an even more outlandish title and get even more views. Doesn't make it right.
      - HeWhoLurksLate 3mo ago
        since it's too much to paste in here, here's 10 recent tech review videos from each of the top 10 most viewed tech youtubers: https://pastebin.com/4PZe9iTf https://pastebin.com/4PZe9iTf Here's a few of them: - Humane AI Pin Review: The Worst Product I've Ever Reviewed - I Tested the World's Craziest Smartphone - Do NOT Buy These Fake Tech Products! - This Is Not a Normal Laptop... - Unboxing the $10,000 Mystery Tech Box - Don't Make This PC Building Mistake - This Desk Accessory Changes Everything - I Didn't Expect This Phone to Be This Good - I Bought a Mystery Tech Box from Amazon - Testing the Craziest Cheap Tech on Temu Jeff Geerling's videos have fine titles. Declaring that Jeff can't be a serious reviewer because he uses clickbait is kinda silly. Have you seen the state of journalism? Somehow the tabloids are frequently less clickbaity.
        joshspankit 2mo ago
        It also seems that YouTube is steering the ship: they could simply push content that’s straightforward and non-clickbait (and in fact: downgrade clickbait), but as Geoff says the clickbait got 2x the traffic. That’s not “the same amount of people were shown the video and 2x the people clicked in”. The algo is always skewing.
- rstuart4133 3mo ago
  You mentioned in your you were interested in seeing the 18A replacement for the N100 series. My understanding is the Wildcat lake 304 is that replacement, and it's been "released" for a while. It can be configured down to 10W vs 6W for the N100. Both draw about 7W from the wall when idle. The 304 is about 80% faster for the same power draw, has a better GPU in includes a 15 TOPS NPU. Despite the 304 being released, it's not easily available yet.
  - geerlingguy 2mo ago
    Fingers crossed some of the usual mini PC suspects pick it up as it rolls out. Though I think 4 or 8 GB is back on the menu, annoyingly. Maybe it'll get some of the mini PC vendors to stop shipping Windows 11 by default!
- fyredge 2mo ago
  Don't worry too much about it. For what it's worth, you made the sponsorship disclaimer abundantly clear up front and the comparison was fair. I went through the whole thread of this conversion, and as the old adage goes, don't feed the trolls.
- tremon 2mo ago
  > this laptop was loaned to me for a couple weeks > this was not sponsored in any way Aren't you contradicting yourself here? For what purpose was the laptop loaned to you, and by whom? I'd consider a review loan a kind of sponsorship, even if you weren't paid to come to a specific conclusion.
  - deleted 2mo ago
    [deleted]
  - timpera 2mo ago
    It's common for manufacturers to loan devices for review, without having any input in the content of the review. It is disclosed here in the video, which seems fine imo.
  - kadoban 2mo ago
    It was obviously loaned so he could do a review. That's not sponsorship. You should _want_ that to happen, otherwise the only people who can do reviews will be the few who can afford to spend thousands for hardware they don't want or need.
AnthonyMouse 3mo ago
Getting performance per watt out of the smaller CPUs is actually more impressive because they can't amortize the non-CPU power draws in the system over as much performance. Increasing the performance while maintaining that performance per watt is then entirely straightforward because you just use more of the same cores.
- aurareturn 3mo ago
  Except Intel's Core 5 320 is almost certainly bigger than the A18 Pro CPU.
  - AnthonyMouse 3mo ago
    They both have 2 P-cores and 4 E-cores.
    - aurareturn 3mo ago
      Yes, they both have the same and Intel cores are known to be bigger than AMD and Apple cores but poor in area/performance. So I'm not sure what your original post about smaller cores is all about considering that the A18 Pro CPU is almost certainly smaller in actual die size.
      - AnthonyMouse 3mo ago
        It's not about die area at all. It's about the SSD and chipset and WiFi etc. each using power on top of what the CPU uses, and ending up as a much larger percentage of system power draw for a 15W CPU than for the same system with a 60W CPU that has around four times the multi-thread performance by having four times as many of the exact same cores.
        aurareturn 3mo ago
        You lost me. Maybe you can articulate what you're arguing from the start?
shuwix 2mo ago
If the result isn't what you want it to be ... it's undisclosed sponsor review. If it's utter Apple shill bullcrap like Geekbench, caught 100x rewriting results in favor of Apple (for what rea$on it'$ not hard to figure out), it's perfectly OK because it supports what you believe in.
mmcnl 2mo ago
You're completely right. Power draw scales non-linearly with clock frequency. Therefore one can easily increase perf/W by lowering the clock frequency, at the expense of performance. This is not new information, this is basic physics. The Apple M-chips were not revolutionary because of their efficiency, but because they were (and still are) efficient AND fast. In fact the fastest consumer chips on the market. So agreed, this is extremely misleading.
wasfgwp 2mo ago
> faster M3 and M4 Macs are pushing through up to 1.2 Teraflops. That Intel chip is competing against the A series in the Neo. To get to M you need to spend at least 50% more (and there are considerably better Intel chip in laptops at that price range as well) Also benchmark performance hardly matters for people buying laptops like this. It just has to be fast enough and not lag when running a handful of apps and have decent battery life (which presumably is the case here)
- aurareturn 2mo ago
  Also benchmark performance hardly matters for people buying laptops like this. It just has to be fast enough and not lag when running a handful of apps and have decent battery life (which presumably is the case here) Even you're fooled. The A18 Pro is 50% faster in ST and maintains the ST while being fanless. The Intel chip will throttle almost immediately. The difference in efficiency is 3-4x.

denismi 3mo ago

> This is like saying my Intel Pentium 3 matches Apple M5 in perf/watt ... if it was within orders of magnitude of being true, perhaps.

geerlingguy 3mo ago

No, this laptop was loaned to me for a couple weeks (it's boxed up and ready to ship back now), and I fully disclose any and all sponsorship (this was not sponsored in any way); see my policies here: https://github.com/geerlingguy/youtube#sponsorships https://github.com/geerlingguy/youtube#sponsorships Further, I'm basing my opinion on a number of benchmarks and power measurements besides just HPL. I just favor that because it's one of the few that push a CPU hard, fills system memory, and can't easily be gamed/made irrelevant with new architecture. The main point of my blog post is to say this is the first Intel chip that's even punched in the same weight class as any Apple Silicon, wrt efficiency. It quite surprised me.

aurareturn 3mo ago
This is your actual headline: "Intel just matched Apple Silicon. Seriously." You're basing the headline on a single FP64 test for a $600 laptop. Come on man. If your headline was being honest, it'd say "Apple A18 Pro is still 3-4x more efficient and significantly faster than Intel's low end chip in common tasks". If this isn't an undisclosed sponsored review, then it's just misleading clickbait for Youtube views. It's clearly working for you. You can do better.
- geerlingguy 3mo ago
  I had three YouTube titles, this one got about 2x the watch time as the other two, so I let YT pick it. For technical readers, I write my blog posts. I don't have to (I lose money hosting that thing and all it's mostly just free training data for Anthropic, OpenAI, et all), but I enjoy writing, so I do it anyway. If you don't like the YT game, please subscribe to the blog's RSS feed. I much prefer text over video.
  - aurareturn 3mo ago
    Just because this title did the best doesn't make it not misleading. If you are a serious reviewer, it wouldn't have been an option in the first place. You can make an even more outlandish title and get even more views. Doesn't make it right.
    - HeWhoLurksLate 3mo ago
      since it's too much to paste in here, here's 10 recent tech review videos from each of the top 10 most viewed tech youtubers: https://pastebin.com/4PZe9iTf https://pastebin.com/4PZe9iTf Here's a few of them: - Humane AI Pin Review: The Worst Product I've Ever Reviewed - I Tested the World's Craziest Smartphone - Do NOT Buy These Fake Tech Products! - This Is Not a Normal Laptop... - Unboxing the $10,000 Mystery Tech Box - Don't Make This PC Building Mistake - This Desk Accessory Changes Everything - I Didn't Expect This Phone to Be This Good - I Bought a Mystery Tech Box from Amazon - Testing the Craziest Cheap Tech on Temu Jeff Geerling's videos have fine titles. Declaring that Jeff can't be a serious reviewer because he uses clickbait is kinda silly. Have you seen the state of journalism? Somehow the tabloids are frequently less clickbaity.
      - joshspankit 2mo ago
        It also seems that YouTube is steering the ship: they could simply push content that’s straightforward and non-clickbait (and in fact: downgrade clickbait), but as Geoff says the clickbait got 2x the traffic. That’s not “the same amount of people were shown the video and 2x the people clicked in”. The algo is always skewing.
rstuart4133 3mo ago
You mentioned in your you were interested in seeing the 18A replacement for the N100 series. My understanding is the Wildcat lake 304 is that replacement, and it's been "released" for a while. It can be configured down to 10W vs 6W for the N100. Both draw about 7W from the wall when idle. The 304 is about 80% faster for the same power draw, has a better GPU in includes a 15 TOPS NPU. Despite the 304 being released, it's not easily available yet.
- geerlingguy 2mo ago
  Fingers crossed some of the usual mini PC suspects pick it up as it rolls out. Though I think 4 or 8 GB is back on the menu, annoyingly. Maybe it'll get some of the mini PC vendors to stop shipping Windows 11 by default!
fyredge 2mo ago
Don't worry too much about it. For what it's worth, you made the sponsorship disclaimer abundantly clear up front and the comparison was fair. I went through the whole thread of this conversion, and as the old adage goes, don't feed the trolls.
tremon 2mo ago
> this laptop was loaned to me for a couple weeks > this was not sponsored in any way Aren't you contradicting yourself here? For what purpose was the laptop loaned to you, and by whom? I'd consider a review loan a kind of sponsorship, even if you weren't paid to come to a specific conclusion.
- deleted 2mo ago
  [deleted]
- timpera 2mo ago
  It's common for manufacturers to loan devices for review, without having any input in the content of the review. It is disclosed here in the video, which seems fine imo.
- kadoban 2mo ago
  It was obviously loaned so he could do a review. That's not sponsorship. You should _want_ that to happen, otherwise the only people who can do reviews will be the few who can afford to spend thousands for hardware they don't want or need.

AnthonyMouse 3mo ago

Getting performance per watt out of the smaller CPUs is actually more impressive because they can't amortize the non-CPU power draws in the system over as much performance. Increasing the performance while maintaining that performance per watt is then entirely straightforward because you just use more of the same cores.

aurareturn 3mo ago
Except Intel's Core 5 320 is almost certainly bigger than the A18 Pro CPU.
- AnthonyMouse 3mo ago
  They both have 2 P-cores and 4 E-cores.
  - aurareturn 3mo ago
    Yes, they both have the same and Intel cores are known to be bigger than AMD and Apple cores but poor in area/performance. So I'm not sure what your original post about smaller cores is all about considering that the A18 Pro CPU is almost certainly smaller in actual die size.
    - AnthonyMouse 3mo ago
      It's not about die area at all. It's about the SSD and chipset and WiFi etc. each using power on top of what the CPU uses, and ending up as a much larger percentage of system power draw for a 15W CPU than for the same system with a 60W CPU that has around four times the multi-thread performance by having four times as many of the exact same cores.
      - aurareturn 3mo ago
        You lost me. Maybe you can articulate what you're arguing from the start?

shuwix 2mo ago

If the result isn't what you want it to be ... it's undisclosed sponsor review. If it's utter Apple shill bullcrap like Geekbench, caught 100x rewriting results in favor of Apple (for what rea$on it'$ not hard to figure out), it's perfectly OK because it supports what you believe in.

mmcnl 2mo ago

You're completely right. Power draw scales non-linearly with clock frequency. Therefore one can easily increase perf/W by lowering the clock frequency, at the expense of performance. This is not new information, this is basic physics. The Apple M-chips were not revolutionary because of their efficiency, but because they were (and still are) efficient AND fast. In fact the fastest consumer chips on the market. So agreed, this is extremely misleading.

wasfgwp 2mo ago

> faster M3 and M4 Macs are pushing through up to 1.2 Teraflops. That Intel chip is competing against the A series in the Neo. To get to M you need to spend at least 50% more (and there are considerably better Intel chip in laptops at that price range as well) Also benchmark performance hardly matters for people buying laptops like this. It just has to be fast enough and not lag when running a handful of apps and have decent battery life (which presumably is the case here)

aurareturn 2mo ago
Also benchmark performance hardly matters for people buying laptops like this. It just has to be fast enough and not lag when running a handful of apps and have decent battery life (which presumably is the case here) Even you're fooled. The A18 Pro is 50% faster in ST and maintains the ST while being fanless. The Intel chip will throttle almost immediately. The difference in efficiency is 3-4x.