Intel Alder Lake vs. Apple M1

[JMacHack]

Is one site including the charging brick and cord?

No, if they did it’d be this;

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[tmoerel]

Definitely. I cancelled my order for the 14". I wish Apple made a carbon fiber version.

Carbon fiber would be perfect for trapping heat inside and cause severe thermal throttling. There is a good reason macs are aluminium. It cools the insides!

 

[leman]

Carbon fiber would be perfect for trapping heat inside and cause severe thermal throttling. There is a good reason macs are aluminium. It cools the insides!

Carbon fiber also looks terrible on a laptop. A metallic body oozes perception of quality and premiumness (is that a word?)

 

[leman]

Regarding early ADL mobile benchmarks: no surprises here. Faster than M1 at the expense of massively increased power consumption. As mentioned before, it’s a typical bait and switch. They are running their mobile parts at desktop power levels and claim to be the fastest. And of course, gamers will eat that up and ask for seconds.

 

[tmoerel]

Regarding early ADL mobile benchmarks: no surprises here. Faster than M1 at the expense of massively increased power consumption. As mentioned before, it’s a typical bait and switch. They are running their mobile parts at desktop power levels and claim to be the fastest. And of course, gamers will eat that up and ask for seconds.

Gamers are irrelevant

 

[leman]

Gamers are irrelevant

Gamers drive the opinion in the consumer computing space unfortunately. It’s a really bleak landscape anyway. Most purchases are driven by soulless IT departments who’s only concern is to buy the cheapest crap they can get away with and “knowledge” is driven by gamers who have no clue what they are talking about.

 

[mr_roboto]

Carbon fiber would be perfect for trapping heat inside and cause severe thermal throttling. There is a good reason macs are aluminium. It cools the insides!

This idea is popular, but not as true as people tend to assume. If you disassemble a MacBook, you'll find they use plastic liners in key spots to insulate the aluminum from hot components like the M1 SoC.

Why would they do that? It's because if they left a more direct path for heat to get into the aluminum case, it would frequently get hot enough to be painful to touch, and possibly cause burns. Not a good idea. In everything but the fanless machines, heat is mostly supposed to leave by sucking in cold air, moving it past a heatsink, and expelling the heated air. In the fanless machines, they just restrict power enough to avoid making the computer's skin too hot.

 

[satcomer]

All I know is gamers have left stagnant Intel and moved over to AMD! Now more and more PC laptops sporting AMD chips too! If Intel doesn't change are going to wither like BlockBuster on line being pig headed!

 

[tmoerel]

This idea is popular, but not as true as people tend to assume. If you disassemble a MacBook, you'll find they use plastic liners in key spots to insulate the aluminum from hot components like the M1 SoC.

Why would they do that? It's because if they left a more direct path for heat to get into the aluminum case, it would frequently get hot enough to be painful to touch, and possibly cause burns. Not a good idea. In everything but the fanless machines, heat is mostly supposed to leave by sucking in cold air, moving it past a heatsink, and expelling the heated air. In the fanless machines, they just restrict power enough to avoid making the computer's skin too hot.

As you said, there is plastic to avoid direct contact to avoid burning. Also there is plastic there where electrical insulation is needed. But hot circulating air heats the metal and thus takes heat to the outside through thermal conductivity. So yes, the metal is still the better option!

 

[T'hain Esh Kelch]

All I know is gamers have left stagnant Intel and moved over to AMD! Now more and more PC laptops sporting AMD chips too! If Intel doesn't change are going to wither like BlockBuster on line being pig headed!

To me it appears that Intel pulled out all the stuff they have been working on the last 10 years, and crammed it into Alder Lake, just to get the crown back from AMD, and thus get more sales. They appear to be quite a leap in performance, compared to the previous chips. Funny how that just suddenly happened.

AMD only have a few years, before they are both on the same node, and in that case, AMD needs to up their chips it seems.

 

[souko]

Regarding early ADL mobile benchmarks: no surprises here. Faster than M1 at the expense of massively increased power consumption. As mentioned before, it’s a typical bait and switch. They are running their mobile parts at desktop power levels and claim to be the fastest. And of course, gamers will eat that up and ask for seconds.

Exactly


So 115W Alder lake is slightly more powerfull than 30W M1 Pro/Max… (CPU only power consmuption compared)

 

[bobcomer]

Carbon fiber would be perfect for trapping heat inside and cause severe thermal throttling. There is a good reason macs are aluminium. It cools the insides!

That hasn't been a problem with our Lenovo Laptops. You know fans and ducts can cool too. And I never hear the fans on them either...

 

[cmaier]

Gamers drive the opinion in the consumer computing space unfortunately. It’s a really bleak landscape anyway. Most purchases are driven by soulless IT departments who’s only concern is to buy the cheapest crap they can get away with and “knowledge” is driven by gamers who have no clue what they are talking about.

Essentially 2.5-3x power consumption, ⅓ battery life, and fans roaring the whole time to get around the same performance.

We see apple made the right choice.

 

[Gerdi]

To me it appears that Intel pulled out all the stuff they have been working on the last 10 years, and crammed it into Alder Lake, just to get the crown back from AMD, and thus get more sales. They appear to be quite a leap in performance, compared to the previous chips. Funny how that just suddenly happened.

AMD only have a few years, before they are both on the same node, and in that case, AMD needs to up their chips it seems.

The only thing Intel really did was upping the core count in expense of more power. Thats hardly a great engineering achievement. The only thing AMD would have to do is putting a 12-16 core Ryzen into a laptop and let it run at 85W in order to beat Intel - we are talking about existing AMD designs at 7nm here...
It gets even much worse for Intel if you imagine how many Apple Silicon cores you could put into a design, which is allowed to consume 85W sustained power.
The fallacy you fell for is, that you ignore power and just look at the performance - which paints a totally skewed picture of where Intel stands relative to others.

 

[leman]

Essentially 2.5-3x power consumption, ⅓ battery life, and fans roaring the whole time to get around the same performance.

We see apple made the right choice.

Yep. A practical anecdote. Some time ago I received the "battery low" notification. Now, more then half an hour later I am at 8% — and I am not just reading the forums, I am exporting databases, running all kind of crazy scripts and have five code editors open. I think is still have about two hours of real work usage in this thing before I am really forced to get the charger...

And of course, no compromises in performance just because I decided to work in the comfort of my lounge chair instead of sitting on a desk...

 

[robco74]

Intel is also preparing to enter the dGPU space as well. Unless they bail at the last minute again. I suppose more available GPUs is good overall, as is more competition for Nvidia, though I'm not sure if anyone will be able to overcome their lead anytime soon.

 

[mi7chy]

This performance scaling by watt graph should be standard for all CPUs and GPUs. For 12700H the sweet spot is at 45W. At ~120W it's slower than AMD 5950x that's just shy of 10K on Cinebench R20.

 

[januarydrive7]

Yep. A practical anecdote. Some time ago I received the "battery low" notification. Now, more then half an hour later I am at 8% — and I am not just reading the forums, I am exporting databases, running all kind of crazy scripts and have five code editors open. I think is still have about two hours of real work usage in this thing before I am really forced to get the charger...

And of course, no compromises in performance just because I decided to work in the comfort of my lounge chair instead of sitting on a desk...

Despite all of the praises I've heard re: battery life, this is still astounding to me. I'm on a 16" with 2.3 core i9 and, even just browsing the forums, I'll have at most 10-20 minutes (at about 50% brightness) when I get down to single digits battery % left. If I'm actually working, that can easily be < 5 minutes. I'm excited to try one of these out in the next year or so.

 

[tomO2013]

Good to know.... so top end i9 is slightly faster in geek bench but I have to use a brick with go-faster lights to get my daily geekbench to beat MBP16 by slight margin at a few multiples of power requirement.

On the other hand, looking at the scaling factors in terms of performance of productivity apps that I use regularly that are Apple silicon optimized, Final Cut Pro and logic have taken a huge performance bump moving from a 2019 i9 MacBook Pro or even a Mac Pro Xeon desktop over to the new M1 Max MBP when taking advantage of the co-processors and accelerators....
I still don't see how theoretically **IF** Apple had kept Intel and put Alderlake in an 8lb brick with neon go-fast lights and had it tethered permanently to a wall-wart... how final cut would have scaled faster. I don't think Alderlake could come close to closing the performance gap that I'm seeing going from i9 or even desktop Xeon on FCP, Xcode. Again apps I use.
I don't use sockfish or cinebench daily and PS5 is my gaming machine of choice, but I'm really happy that Apple moved to ARM. I'm loving bringing the MBP to a coffee shop and being able to edit untethered and still faster than a high end Mac Pro desktop Xeon in FCP and Xcode compiles.

 

[MayaUser]

So, bottom line is this i9 top of the line of Intel mobile cpu for the whole 2022 year? If so, nothing remarkable..but if its not, and this is just the first and the slowest i9 from 2022 then, its quite an achievement and glad Intel is back with all its power consumption it needs
Maybe in December 2022 i will take the latest i9 that will have max turbo @9.20 ghz so i can shut down my whole street

 

[dgdosen]

It'd be nice for all the M2 variants to handily beat the 12900HK in Geekbench Single Core... and the M2Max to beat the 12900HK in both single core and multicore... all at 1/3 the power draw.

 

[leman]

So, bottom line is this i9 top of the line of Intel mobile cpu for the whole 2022 year? If so, nothing remarkable..but if its not, and this is just the first and the slowest i9 from 2022 then, its quite an achievement and glad Intel is back with all its power consumption it needs
Maybe in December 2022 i will take the latest i9 that will have max turbo @9.20 ghz so i can shut down my whole street

That’s the fastest mobile ADL, running in the biggest gaming laptop that can sustain over 100W CPU power draw. Mainstream CPUs in usual multimedia laptops will be considerably slower.

 

[deconstruct60]

To me it appears that Intel pulled out all the stuff they have been working on the last 10 years, and crammed it into Alder Lake, just to get the crown back from AMD, and thus get more sales. They appear to be quite a leap in performance, compared to the previous chips. Funny how that just suddenly happened.(

Suddenly???

Gen 10 ( Ice Lake ) -> Gen 11 ( Tiger lake ) -> Gen 12 ( Alder Lake )

It took three iterations to get running on what started out as a revised 10nm foundation. ( Skipping Cannon Lake that didn't ship across wide line up).

The implication that Intel was waiting around with a finished enhanced SuperFin in the labs for the last 3-4 years just waiting until things got just bad enough to introduce is a bit misguided. A substantive portion of this is because they screwed up. It is taking a long time to dig their way out of the hole.

They are also not particularly wining top performance title on mobile laptop either. At least with the iGPU. Those E cores a capping what they can allocate for GPU cores.

In contrast, they have been in a screwed up state so long ( ~ 4 years ) that the more deliberate workarounds started several years ago are starting to come out of the pipeline. ( I suspect Rocket Lake was a mindfart that someone started on a shorter than usual design cycle time that not surprisingly produced less than reasonable results. )

Gen 13 ( Raptor Lake) that will coming late 2022 -early 2023. More "pour E cores on top" workaround solution. Pretty good chance it will bleed even more power on a bigger die to win several of the tech press's favorite tech porn benchmarks.

AMD only have a few years, before they are both on the same node, and in that case, AMD needs to up their chips it seems.

AMD just needs to stay on the steady, methodical update path. AMD has not shortage of competitors besides Intel ( battling Nvidia also . The Windows ARM solutions like Qualcomm 8cx gen 3 are just plain slow anymore. Server Arm solutions . etc. ) Competitors coming from multiple directions .

Intel seems to be trying to pull the exotic , off the wall solutions to try to leapfrog back. Decent chance one of those will have blow-back down the road.

 

[senttoschool]

AMD just needs to stay on the steady, methodical update path. AMD has not shortage of competitors besides Intel ( battling Nvidia also . The Windows ARM solutions like Qualcomm 8cx gen 3 are just plain slow anymore. Server Arm solutions . etc. ) Competitors coming from multiple directions .

I personally think AMD is done in the Windows laptop market. They'll be the budget option again. Intel is hyper aggressive right now; undercutting AMD on prices, spending billions to buy TSMC wafers at the same time as AMD or even before AMD, and releasing new architectures at an extremely rapid pace.

Intel is willing to sacrifice its margins to put AMD back in the rearview mirror. I think they will succeed.

If AMD releases Zen4 in Q4 of 2022, it will mark 2 years since Zen3. In that same time, Intel will have gone from Tiger Lake to Alder Lake to Raptor Lake. Intel is targeting Meteor Lake in 2023.

Intel seems to be trying to pull the exotic , off the wall solutions to try to leapfrog back. Decent chance one of those will have blow-back down the road.

Not sure why you think it's exotic. It's clear that the laptop/desktop world is heading towards big.Little. AMD is actually years behind Intel on this because Zen4 won't be big.Little. As a software developer, big.Little makes total sense to me even in high-power devices.

Gen 13 ( Raptor Lake) that will coming late 2022 -early 2023. More "pour E cores on top" workaround solution. Pretty good chance it will bleed even more power on a bigger die to win several of the tech press's favorite tech porn benchmarks.

Again, big.Little is here to stay. It's not exotic. big.Little has been mainstream on mobile for over a decade. It makes perfect sense for the vast majority of consumer workloads.

On a day to day basis, most consumers will notice a faster single-thread CPU more than a multi-CPU thread. big.Little allows Intel/Apple/ARM to design and implement a few really big high-performance cores and then let little cores work on background tasks.

In addition, Intel's E cores have the performance of Skylake at 1/3 the wattage. That's damn impressive as long as you don't compare to Apple Silicon.

 

[leman]

Again, big.Little is here to stay. It's not exotic. big.Little has been mainstream on mobile for over a decade. It makes perfect sense for the vast majority of consumer workloads.

On a day to day basis, most consumers will notice a faster single-thread CPU more than a multi-CPU thread. big.Little allows Intel/Apple/ARM to design and implement a few really big high-performance cores and then let little cores work on background tasks.

In addition, Intel's E cores have the performance of Skylake at 1/3 the wattage. That's damn impressive as long as you don't compare to Apple Silicon.

Intel's current strategy is not the "classical" big.little though. Its parallel thoughtput. They are not focusing on combination of high performance cores for burst and high efficiency cores for efficiency, they are focusing on MANY mid-efficiency cores for higher performance in multi-core workloads. Alder Lake already comes with 16 cores (24 threads!), and so requires software that can take really good advantage of multiple cores to use the chip well. Raptor Lake is supposed to up the number throughput cores to 16, that will essentially result in a 32-thread CPU. Great for benchmarks, a bit awkward for real-world performance.

This is very different from, say, Apple's big.little (where high-performance cores use as much power as Intel's efficiency cores, and the efficiency cores are really there for efficiency). And it is also very different from what AMD is rumoured to do (their performance cores are also more efficient than Intel's). And of course, there is the modern Android approach... but the main purpose of their single "very fast core" is essentially benchmarking shenanigans.