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~<p>This is not the victory that the title implies.<p>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.
> 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<p>Ouch.<p>> MSI GE76 Raider got 6 hours of offline video playback, a far cry from the MacBook Pro’s 17 hours.<p>Double ouch. That's a huge gap, and 6 is low even in absolute terms.<p>It's still a nice beefy chip, but still a far cry from the engineering marvel that Apple pulled off with the M1
A lot of people are misinterpreting the results here (understandably, the article is pretty bad).<p>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.<p>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.<p>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 <i>or</i> much faster than this benchmark suggests.
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.<p>I don't care what any test, but tripling battery life with no visible performance degradation is a huge win in my book.
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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.
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.<p>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.<p>Second, you can look at just a few benchmarks and pick winners. You can look at maximum power draw and pick losers.<p>Or you can look at a lot of other things. For one, Alder Lake <i>is</i> 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].<p>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.<p>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.<p>[0] <a href="https://youtu.be/Ur3Y2vxpTWo?t=345" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/Ur3Y2vxpTWo?t=345</a>
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...
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?<p>My 2008 17" MacBook Pro has a screen that's 1920 x 1200. My iPhone 6+ is 1920 x 1080.<p>What am I missing? Is the non-Apple world really fine with stagnant resolutions?
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.<p>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).<p>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.
1. The M1 / M1 Pro / Max Single Core Max out at around 5W. On TSMC 5nm, at 3.2Ghz.<p>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.<p>3. The Single core performance between the two are about ~5% to 20% if you are SIMD heavy.<p>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, <i>8 Channel</i> ( 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.<p>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.
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.
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.
The Alder Lake monster review on AnandTech is fun. A desktop replacement laptop: ten pounds! 150 Watts! nVidia RTX! Whips and chains!<p><a href="https://www.anandtech.com/show/17223/intel-alder-lake-h-core-i9-12900hk-review-msi-raider-ge76-goes-hybrid" rel="nofollow">https://www.anandtech.com/show/17223/intel-alder-lake-h-core...</a><p>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.<p>The Alder Lake box has 100% more CUDA.<p>(I couldn't figure out the idle power draw from the review, AnandTech publishes their raw data, so maybe it's in there somewhere. <a href="https://www.anandtech.com/bench" rel="nofollow">https://www.anandtech.com/bench</a> )
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 <a href="https://www.zdnet.com/article/ces-2022-intel-says-it-has-a-mobile-i9-that-will-beat-the-apple-m1-max/" rel="nofollow">https://www.zdnet.com/article/ces-2022-intel-says-it-has-a-m...</a>).<p>Also, it may derail: it seems that we could <i>never</i> have all good things at the same time:<p>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.<p>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.<p>(edited for formatting)
FTA:<p>> In the end, though, comparing Alder Lake and the M1 ends up being a simple academic exercise that doesn’t amount to much.<p>There you have it.
Dumb question, but whats the engineering principle behind higher performance when increasing power usage?<p>Is it because pipelines are clocked faster?
An MSI GE76 is significantly fatter, heavier and hotter than a macbook pro 14 inch.<p>It's not a fair comparison at all. This is comparing a thin/light laptop with a designed-for-purpose gaming laptop.<p>Here's an image showing the large heat exhaust vents.<p><a href="https://storage-asset.msi.com/global/picture/image/feature/nb/GE/GE76-Raider/images/gallery-id02.png" rel="nofollow">https://storage-asset.msi.com/global/picture/image/feature/n...</a>
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.<p>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.<p>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.
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.
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.<p>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 :)).<p>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).<p>I can also game on the Asus too :)
I would think that speed would come 5th in my list of desirable feature in a laptop<p>1. portability
2. battery lifetime
3. cost
4. connectivity<p>So Intel bragging for speed with such higher consumption and dedicated GPU (as opposed to integrated one).
Maybe I have some niche use
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.<p>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.<p>I'm not sure they'd do that inversion if they knew their chips were overall better.
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.
It amuses me how the decades-long market leader is scrambling to recover from the blow Apple dealt them.<p>What could have been if the Itanium had worked out. If they had done something good with XScale. If, if...
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)
Also, on my MacBook tonight, the CPU core temperatures reported via Macs Fan Control were ambient temperature. Which seems kinda crazy.<p>It was idling the CPUs, as it performs the most important task of the hour: downloading another 2GB system update.
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.
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 ?