Intel claims new i9 is faster than M1 Max

But laptops shouldn’t need to draw 35 watts minimum. If it can’t scale down when idle I think I’d pass.

But it's not hard to believe that it will outrun the M1 Max in multithreaded benchmarks, and likely even single-threaded benchmarks. Intel's latest desktop parts are already faster than an M1 Max by a not-insignificant amount, and this is just a lower-power version. Intel's Alder Lake desktop parts are already surprisingly power efficient (ignoring the heavily clocked i9-12900K flagship, which was designed to basically ignore power consumption)

The real wildcard is where the power consumption comes in. Intel has some slides showing it being competitive with or even surpassing the M1 Max. I know a lot a lot of people will scoff at such a claim, but I don't actually have a hard time believing it.

I think the M1 is still going to win when it comes to idle consumption, though. I'm going to guess that net battery life is still going to favor the M1 by a decent margin, at least for mixed workloads where the CPU is idle a lot.

Most people I've seen use laptops near chargers, or at least within 2 hours of the nearest charging opportunity. Sometimes people travel and need more, but I don't think it's that common to need eight hours of charge at maximum performance.

Don't get me wrong, the M1 is an engineering marvel and as Apple's competitors move to a similar node size I hope they too will get these power usage benefits some way or another, but I don't think the average consumer needs all the features the M1 offers.

If Intel can come up with a laptop that's faster than the M1 at two thirds the price with the only downside being that you only get four hours of battery out of it with all cores clocked to their limit, then I don't see why most people who need the horsepower would pay extra for the M1, especially with its restrictions on what operating systems it can run comfortably. The impressive efficiency of the M1 simply isn't that pressing a matter for most people.

I hope Intel is right, and I hope they beat Apple. We've seen AMD overtake Intel and then saw their innovations slow to a crawl while they were ahead. Apple might end up doing the very same if there is no competition in this space. If Intel, AMD or Qualcom produce a chip even better than the M1, we can all only stand to gain from this.

I read that out loud, thinking I was back at the optometrist.

35w should be trivial to cool. My current laptop stays quiet up to 50w on the CPU with graphite pads on the GPU and liquid metal on the CPU.