Intel's flagship Alder Lake Core i9 laptop processor is faster than Apple's M1 Max SoC, according to new benchmarks, but the caveat is that the latter is much more power efficient.
Macworld put the Core i9-12900HK hidden in an MSI GE76 Raider laptop to the test and compared it to a pair of 14-inch MacBook Pro models running the M1 Max and M1 Pro chips respectively. The tests used Geekbench and Cinebench, as both benchmarks can be run on both Windows and Mac machines.
For Geekbench, the Alder Lake processor outperformed the M1 Max, with scores of 13 vs. 235 respectively for multi-core, a relatively narrow 12% gain, and 590 vs. 5 for single core. As Macworld points out, that's not a difference you'll really notice in terms of actual performance, but it's still a win for Intel, and little more than a marginal win.
In Cinebench R23, the Core i9-12900HK was compared to the M1 Pro (Macworld did not score for the Max), but in this battle the Intel chip scored a multi-core score of 15 versus the M981 Pro's 12, a difference steeper at 381% For a single core, the Intel chip reached 1 vs. 29.
However, the tables have been very reversed when it comes to measuring the power consumption of these laptop chips. Macworld found that the Alder Lake-powered MSI laptop drew around 100 W in Cinebench R23 multi-core tests, but with peaks of around 130 W to 140 W. According to Anandtech's tests of the M1 Max in Cinebench, it drew around 40 W, so you can see that Power consumption is a big win for Apple here.
Review: Fast laptop processor, but let's not forget battery life
So Intel wins the straight performance stakes, but arguably the biggest win goes to Apple, when you look at the relatively narrow margin of victory in some of these benchmarks, compared to the yawning chasm in power consumption. Energy.
Keep in mind that the M1 Max uses about half the power of the Core i9-12900HK, based on the tests highlighted here, and that's especially important for laptops, because when you're on the go, power consumption and battery life the battery are great. concerns.
It's also worth remembering that the kind of laptops that run Alder Lake's flagship chip will be expensive, as is the case with the MSI GE76 Raider here, which includes the Core i9-12900HK. Naturally, it has plenty of other high-end components, including an Nvidia RTX 3080 Ti GPU, which is likely to be the case with laptops like this, and the GE76 weighs in at €3,999 (about $3,000, £5,650 AUD). Whereas a 14-inch MacBook Pro with M1 Max can be cheaper than that (and the price is much cheaper with the M1 Pro chip, which is close to the Max variant, for Geekbench results anyway).
In short, Intel's new Alder Lake flagship is certainly an impressive speed demon of a laptop processor, but you'll pay a price not only in dollars, but also in power consumption compared to silicon.
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Via WCcftech