Intel Alder Lake vs. Apple M1

[deconstruct60]

Windows is only good for Games! So niche games and buy a M1 Max to make money doing stuff like audio or being a picture buff or DJ!

M1 Max to DJ (Disc Jockey) ? Exactly how is doubling up the GPU cores going to contribute greatly to transcoding and mixing music ? To get to Max with a fixed budget possibly trading away more RAM and/or Storage capacity for GPU cores which may/may not be using. ( if you want to go to full max RAM capacity have to shift over to the Max , but bringing along baggage there if not really leveraging the GPU cores. )

There is a substantively large number of apps that Max isn't going to do much more than a M1 Pro will. Definitely some that do, but no near most. Especially, when move away from any kind of high end visual and/or 3D component to the problem space.

 

[bobcomer]

This thing is gonna run HOT and consume a lot of power.

What I need to do counts for more to me. (lack of) Consumption of power is way down my list in needs since I almost always have whatever plugged in.

I'm not sure how well battery life is going to be with this new generation of Intel chips. My comment was in regards to power savings. They chose power savings because it's a laptop. I'm curious to see how their desktop chips are going to be when power savings is not on the table.

But if you look at what I posted, I said nothing about power. I just said I want a Mac (actually MacOS), but I might need to run a Windows app occasionally at home or when traveling. I also said I was tired of people telling me to buy a Windows machine -- as if I don't have any already. My home Windows laptop is quite good, but heavier than I want, so it doesn't usually get picked for portable tasks, but the screen is a gorgeous hi-res OLED and is high specc'd for a Windows laptop. fwiw, it lighter than a 16" M1 Max MBP by a good margin.

Whatever Intel comes out power-usage-wise is just not in my concerns. Total power usage of a PC is so miniscule compared to other machines it's just not important. I sure hope you can buy the new processors soon, I'll be buying a few work laptops early next year. I'm actually a little excited.

 

[Bandaman]

What I need to do counts for more to me. (lack of) Consumption of power is way down my list in needs since I almost always have whatever plugged in.


But if you look at what I posted, I said nothing about power. I just said I want a Mac (actually MacOS), but I might need to run a Windows app occasionally at home or when traveling. I also said I was tired of people telling me to buy a Windows machine -- as if I don't have any already. My home Windows laptop is quite good, but heavier than I want, so it doesn't usually get picked for portable tasks, but the screen is a gorgeous hi-res OLED and is high specc'd for a Windows laptop. fwiw, it lighter than a 16" M1 Max MBP by a good margin.

Whatever Intel comes out power-usage-wise is just not in my concerns. Total power usage of a PC is so miniscule compared to other machines it's just not important. I sure hope you can buy the new processors soon, I'll be buying a few work laptops early next year. I'm actually a little excited.

FYI I'm on an ASUS G14 right now. I'm not mocking your laptop choices. This thing is both powerful and gets a lot of battery life as well with its battery profiles so I have the best of both worlds. And when I plug it in I can go nuts and enjoy my games. I'm more excited to see what AMD is going to come out with (I have a Ryzen CPU in mine right now) in a few months. The new Intel chip is just now catching up to AMD's old chip, so I have a feeling AMD is going to smoke Intel yet again in both raw performance and power efficiency. Either way, competition is good and I'm glad Intel is trying to compete again because they've been sucking for some time now.

I'm also enjoying this 144 Hz display that just works with everything.

 

[satcomer]

M1 Max to DJ (Disc Jockey) ? Exactly how is doubling up the GPU cores going to contribute greatly to transcoding and mixing music ? To get to Max with a fixed budget possibly trading away more RAM and/or Storage capacity for GPU cores which may/may not be using. ( if you want to go to full max RAM capacity have to shift over to the Max , but bringing along baggage there if not really leveraging the GPU cores. )

There is a substantively large number of apps that Max isn't going to do much more than a M1 Pro will. Definitely some that do, but no near most. Especially, when move away from any kind of high end visual and/or 3D component to the problem space.

The doubling is so a Pro Artist could use their Reference Monitor and use native resolution!

 

[robco74]

I've never owned a laptop that only lasted an hour, but just how is that relevant to anything I said?

It may not be relevant to you, but many people actually use their laptops as laptops, away from plugs. Apple has managed to make laptops that not only get great battery life, but don't have to significantly throttle performance to do so. Instead of power at all costs, many laptop users also care about ergonomics, aesthetics, screen quality, etc.

 

[bobcomer]

It may not be relevant to you, but many people actually use their laptops as laptops, away from plugs. Apple has managed to make laptops that not only get great battery life, but don't have to significantly throttle performance to do so. Instead of power at all costs, many laptop users also care about ergonomics, aesthetics, screen quality, etc.

I'm not one of the other ones telling others what they should do.

 

[Kung gu]

FYI I'm on an ASUS G14 right now. I'm not mocking your laptop choices. This thing is both powerful and gets a lot of battery life as well with its battery profiles so I have the best of both worlds. And when I plug it in I can go nuts and enjoy my games. I'm more excited to see what AMD is going to come out with (I have a Ryzen CPU in mine right now) in a few months. The new Intel chip is just now catching up to AMD's old chip, so I have a feeling AMD is going to smoke Intel yet again in both raw performance and power efficiency. Either way, competition is good and I'm glad Intel is trying to compete again because they've been sucking for some time now.

I'm also enjoying this 144 Hz display that just works with everything.

One thing for sure is that the ASUS G14 will never get the same battery life as the M1 Pro 14". You might think the Asus G14 is getting great battery life but compared to the 14" M1 Pro it's minimal.

Look at Anthony's testing of the Asus Zephyrus G14 it got 6hr 53 mins and the 14" M1 Pro got 22hrs+ in a video playback test.

That said each laptop has its ups and downs.

For gaming the Mac sucks but you have want the one of best video editing and the BEST battery life in any laptop and that's your requirement then the 14"\16" M1 Pro MBP is the way to go.

 

[Bandaman]

One thing for sure is that the ASUS G14 will never get the same battery life as the M1 Pro 14". You might think the Asus G14 is getting great battery life but compared to the 14" M1 Pro it's minimal.

Look at Anthony's testing of the Asus Zephyrus G14 it got 6hr 53 mins and the 14" M1 Pro got 22hrs+ in a video playback test.

That said each laptop has its ups and downs.

For gaming the Mac sucks but you have want the one of best video editing and the BEST battery life in any laptop and that's your requirement then the 14"\16" M1 Pro MBP is the way to go.

At no point did I ever say it gets the same battery life. I also have the M1 Air.

For normal usage on the G14 I get about 10 hours of battery life.

The G14 only has a 3060 in it. He should compare it to the G15 with the 3080 and larger battery.

 

[UBS28]

The 16” M1 Max is a laptop, those gaming laptops are portable desktops. The 16” M1 Mac maintains it performance on battery even while gaming laptops become slow as hell.

So it is not really a competition.

Sure, if gaming on laptops is your thing, you should never buy an Apple product in the first place.

Apple could have pushed the M1 Max harder in the 16” model, but they wanted a machine that stays quiet under heavy loads.

 

[deconstruct60]

The doubling is so a Pro Artist could use their Reference Monitor and use native resolution!

For a single XDR display there is no difference for largely 2D content.

tech specs snapshot at the moment:
" ...
Simultaneously supports full native resolution on the built-in display at 1 billion
colors and:

Up to two external displays with up to 6K resolution at 60Hz at over a billion colors (M1 Pro) or
Up to three external displays with up to 6K resolution and one external display with up to 4K resolution at 60Hz at over a billion colors (M1 Max) ... "
MacBook Pro 14- and 16-inch - Technical Specifications - Apple

But an XDR for music/DJ creation? DJ with an XDR? Even bigger waste of money for not material pragmatic impact in the vast majority of that genre. That's more of a "pro" at draining your clients wallets than for better results.

 

[satcomer]

For a single XDR display there is no difference for largely 2D content.

tech specs snapshot at the moment:
" ...
Simultaneously supports full native resolution on the built-in display at 1 billion
colors and:

Up to two external displays with up to 6K resolution at 60Hz at over a billion colors (M1 Pro) or
Up to three external displays with up to 6K resolution and one external display with up to 4K resolution at 60Hz at over a billion colors (M1 Max) ... "
MacBook Pro 14- and 16-inch - Technical Specifications - Apple

But an XDR for music/DJ creation? DJ with an XDR? Even bigger waste of money for not material pragmatic impact in the vast majority of that genre. That's more of a "pro" at draining your clients wallets than for better results.

Pro Tools

Logic Pro

Audacity

For use with Pro Tools use Mackie Mixers to do Live shows! It did work for us own College radio so it should work for any home user!

Plus look at the excellent software for a Mac like LoopBack! Or if you want more BASS on your speaker setup then look at the shareware Audio Hyjack to base to your voice/software!

 

[tomO2013]

Probably not. The M1 max ( 10 cores) is in the ballpark of 80W TDP because dragging along all that much large GPU cores. Twice that would be 180W ballpark (and 20 cores ) and 4x would be in the 300-320W range. Apple is more so designing at the upper levels a GPU with some CPU cores sprinkled on top. Which means highly likely not to get to core counts that match up with SoC which entirely remove ( or at least minimally great reduce the GPU transistor budget allocation. )

Apple will be under 200W but the CPU core count would be in the 20 range. For CPU core only, but high parallel workloads it likely will have issues with 32+ like core counts of CPU only "SoC" packages.

Apple's desktop processor is pretty likely going to carry a large amount of laptop design constraints along with it. One of those is the dual edge sword of having to feed an order of magnitude more math function units with bandwidth to get their work done. ( and therefore a governor cap on the CPU allocated bandwidth).


P.S. 16 P cores and 4 E cores is still "trouble" for Intel and AMD mainstream Gen 12 (an 13) and Zen 3 (and 4) offerings.

However, higher still counts though Apple probably has substantive power dissipation issues to deal with.

Well the numbers that I am basing this hypothesis on is a base power draw of 125W to Alderlake, turbo power draw of 241W and a max power draw of 272W for the CPU only. Not factoring in GPU, or any other off silicon co-processors/accelerators add-in cards. https://www.anandtech.com/show/1704...w-hybrid-performance-brings-hybrid-complexity

When looking at single thread P-core use on alderlake we see 55-65 Watts per individual core P-core. 11-15 W for the E-Core.

For context, based on the highly optimized x86 cinebench results - where x86 holds a 40% margin lead today over M1 - the M1 utilized 39.7W at the wall to provide a result of 12,375. That is 39.7W, all in!

M1 idling on a static screen pulls 200mW. AC power at the wall (for display on and again measuring the entire laptop) was 7.2W.

In single thread cinebench workloads, Anandtech measured 11W to the package for the Apple Silicon M1 Max!

On multi threaded workloads M1 was measured at the package to pull 34-43W on package and 40-62W wall active.

Back to my original guesstimate for providing Apple with a theoretical 272W desktop chip package allowance (based on tlady’s desktop ADL Turbo power draw for CPU only) then, theoretically Apple could push possibly much higher than 20 P-Cores… and possibly in the realm of 25-30 P-cores assuming reasonable scaling.

My 0.02 anyway!

 

[Hal0]

My soul is tired.

Why do you talk like on your deathbed

 

[bosozoku]

Only m1pro/max for me

 

[satcomer]

Only m1pro/max for me

If you like taking pictures then use the shareware PixelMator Pro to pay once instead of subscription software and is 95% as the leader picture software! Besides the program uses the machine learning on the M1 because it's made to take advantage of Mac OS underpinnings!

 

[Icelus]

Have you seen Amazon's Graviton3?

Apparently Intel have too...

Cloud Development Library

Access development resources from Intel that help you work in the cloud.

www.intel.com

 

[thunng8]

Apparently Intel have too...

Cloud Development Library

Access development resources from Intel that help you work in the cloud.

www.intel.com

That link is for graviton2

 

[satcomer]

Another great app to Sound affects in podcast try the shareware Farrago and it's like an old cart machine for podcast!

 

[cbum]

These discussions about the new M architecture vs Intel chips eerily remind me of the old PPC/Altivec arguments, and how things like an optimized Photoshop would blow away the Intel performance etc.

Is it likely Apple can overcome market forces and get enough buy-in from WinIntel devs to change the equation significantly?
Or would you argue they are already there, with enough market- and mindshare for a vibrant Metal ecosystem etc.?
I'm less concerned about gaming, which has been covered ad nauseam in many threads, but more about legacy and vertical apps that may need a strong incentive to justify the cost and work of updating, where the windows market seems to present an easier sell.

 

[leman]

Is it likely Apple can overcome market forces and get enough buy-in from WinIntel devs to change the equation significantly?
Or would you argue they are already there, with enough market- and mindshare for a vibrant Metal ecosystem etc.?

I‘d say it’s already there, no? In the pro space at least, almost everyone of note offers a native ARM version with Metal support. Is there something you are missing? Audio app devs maybe, but those have always been ultra-conservative…

 

[cbum]

I‘d say it’s already there, no? In the pro space at least, almost everyone of note offers a native ARM version with Metal support. Is there something you are missing? Audio app devs maybe, but those have always been ultra-conservative…

In my case, its mostly a longstanding frustration with vertical apps in my field, MolBio & Pathology, like Bioanalyzers, PCR machines or imagers that only have Wintel drivers and analytical SW etc.
This obviously predates the M1 transition, I'm just interested in the potential that things may shift longterm, particularly since I do believe the "Energy consumption" discussion will become more relevant over time.

 

[leman]

In my case, its mostly a longstanding frustration with vertical apps in my field, MolBio & Pathology, like Bioanalyzers, PCR machines or imagers that only have Wintel drivers and analytical SW etc.
This obviously predates the M1 transition, I'm just interested in the potential that things may shift longterm, particularly since I do believe the "Energy consumption" discussion will become more relevant over time.

Ah, yes, I understand your frustration. Specialised software of this kind is almost always problematic. There is just not enough user base to invite innovation. These software suites are often of poor quality, rely on ancient codebases and are essentially on life support.

 

[cbum]

Agree with your points, the reason I had the Altivec flashback is that it does appear that the M architecture opens the possibility of meaningful improvements in performance, as long as the SW is properly adapted, but again, that only works if enough devs jump on board.

 

[leman]

Agree with your points, the reason I had the Altivec flashback is that it does appear that the M architecture opens the possibility of meaningful improvements in performance, as long as the SW is properly adapted, but again, that only works if enough devs jump on board.

It depends, really. Apple Silicon shines on general-purpose software or in general software that is poorly written, where the CPU's large caches and the ability to execute many introductions simultaneously catapults it into a league of its own. For example, some of my single-threaded R scripts run 3-4x (!!!) faster on M1 compared to my 2019 i9 Intel machine. But on well-optimised numerical code that takes advantage of modern x86 capabilities (such as AVX2 and AVX512), M1 is unlikely to be faster (albeit it will be more energy-efficient). The big advantage of M1 is a much more flexible architecture that can adapt to workloads better than the modern x86 CPUs.

 

[bobcomer]

The big advantage of M1 is a much more flexible architecture that can adapt to workloads better than the modern x86 CPUs.

Except that all that software you're talking about already has an x86 version. Advantage Intel type CPU's.

My perfect home machine would have both an intel processor and an M type processor, and I could even use it for work. It wouldn't be the first multi architecture machine I've ever owned, and I love the idea.

Heck, our Power9 i series machine at work is multi architecture, Power9 for the main processing, and an attached Xeon server for doing things the main OS doesn't do so well. (it's connected and controlled by dedicated ethernet, iSCSI related.) The main OS is a seriously good DB/Apps/email server, and the attached Xeon serves Windows PC's better.