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Alder Lake Core i9 processor is faster than the M1 Max

macworld.com

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Re: Alder Lake Core i9 processor is faster than the M1 Max

#111

Post by never_a-pickle »

dijit wrote: post #3

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~ This is not the victory that the title implies. 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.

Not to mention that M1 can run at those speeds on battery. The intel certainly would need to be plugged in to beat it by 5%.

Re: Alder Lake Core i9 processor is faster than the M1 Max

#112

Post by wmf »

MBCook wrote: post #95
wmf wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Intel refuses to go beyond 128-bit memory which starves the iGPU.

Don’t they have their own new GPU that people expected them to announce around now but got “delayed”?

I don't expect Arc Alchemist to be that different than a GeForce 3070 or 3070 Ti. It's still going to be ~90W vs. a 60W M1 Max.

Re: Alder Lake Core i9 processor is faster than the M1 Max

#113

Post by chias »

Eric_WVGG wrote: post #55
dijit wrote: post #3

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~ This is not the victory that the title implies. 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.

I don’t think this is going to happen, but: It would be extremely funny if Apple strapped a heavy copper heatsink and a turbo fan to an M1 and just overclocked the ever-lasting crap out of it. The crazy thing about using a Macbook Pro (with an M1 Pro or M1 Max CPU) is that, in single-threaded performance, it's really no faster than a dippy little Macbook Air. And at the end of the day, single-thread performance is mo…

Overclocking isn't just limited by heat dissipation, and dealing with the additional heat generation is one of the easier issues to overcome. Much more limiting is the fact that the electronic components in the hardware (everything from RAM to the more "integrated" components on the PCBs) have certain amounts of time which they need to take in order to tie voltages high or low, to either read or output a bit. This amount of time is typically very small as compared to the amount of time that a voltage stays tied high or low, and so isn't a problem, but while you can shorten the amount of time that a voltage needs to stay high or low when overclocking, generally the transition time isn't as negotiable. Increasing clock speeds to the point where these transition times dominate means you're going to get garbage reads and garbage writes out of a component.

This is part of why if you're overclocking your computer, you end up experiencing errors or unexpected crashes even when temperature doesn't go too high. Past reasonable tolerances, you can't just cool it more and expect it to work.

Re: Alder Lake Core i9 processor is faster than the M1 Max

#114

Post by nfriedly »

olliej wrote: post #67
MBCook wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not only that but the Apple GPU is around double the strength of the Intel integrated GPU. Obviously the 3080 smashes the Apple GPU but that comes at a huge power cost.

Seriously why can’t Intel make a decent igpu? My understanding is that the M1 GPU is just “ok” and isn’t competing with AMD or nvidia?

The 10th and 11th gen Intel CPUs each brought fairly significant boost to integrated graphics performance. I played Halo Reach and a bunch of other games on a 10th gen iGPU.

But, it had stagnated since the 4th gen. Intels 10th gen graphics were meant to go out with their first 10 nanometer chips, but that took them an extra few years.

All that said, yeah, I'd love to see even better integrated graphics. As others have mentioned, the RAM is a significant limitation.

Re: Alder Lake Core i9 processor is faster than the M1 Max

#115

Post by FateOfNations »

smoldesu wrote: post #94
wmf wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sadly, I don't think the M1 family will clock any higher than it's already going. The rumored M1 Max Duo and M1 Max Quadro will have more cores but they'll still trail Intel in single-thread performance (although not enough for most people to notice).

Precisely. ARM has traditionally had issues scaling it's clock speed even when given ample cooling and power, history suggests that the only way they'll significantly improve performance is with new fab technology, engineering a better design, or expanding horizontally (eg. adding more cores).

My understanding is that Apple isn't using ARM IP cores (i.e. ARM Cortex) but just implement the ARM instruction set architecture using their own proprietary CPU core design.

Edit: Since the A6-era for CPU cores and and A10/11 for the GPU cores.

Re: Alder Lake Core i9 processor is faster than the M1 Max

#116

Post by matthewfcarlson »

barbacoa wrote: post #78
dijit wrote: post #3

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~ This is not the victory that the title implies. 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.

>3.5%-5% increase in performance at more than double the wattage The 100 watts mentioned in the article is the whole laptop power. Google tells[0] me the power consumption of the i9-12900HK is 45 with boosts up to 86W. Intel's 12th gen i9 is built on 7nm, Apple's M1 max is build on 5nm. Rule of thumb, is about 30% power saving at same performance for a new node. So assuming max performance of M1 Max is 40W and i9-129…

That’s just marketing fluff in terms of measurements. Most agree that in terms of gate size, intel’s 7nm is similar to TSMCs 5nm. So you could say that Intel moving to 5 would give them a 30% boost but the TSMC goes to 3nm.

Re: Alder Lake Core i9 processor is faster than the M1 Max

#117

Post by filmgirlcw »

nkellenicki wrote: post #92
addicted wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s not true of the current Macs though. I still have a 2011 era MacBook that I can use, and was very pleasant to use until an OS update a couple of years ago. But that was because I was able to upgrade the RAM, the SSD, and replace the battery. None of those things are possible with macs from the last few years, so their longevity is much more likely to resemble phones than older macs.

I bought my 2013 MacBook Pro with a 1TB SSD and 32GB of RAM, with the highest specced i7 at the time. I sold it last month to pick up a new 2021 MacBook Pro M1 Max. I bought it with 32GB RAM and a 1TB SSD because I don't need anymore, 8 years later. And the i7 I had still beat out last years base model on Geekbench.

Not to take anything away from how long you got to use your computer, but you couldn’t get 32GB of RAM in an Apple laptop until 2018. You likely had 16GB of RAM in 2013 if you had a 15” retina MacBook Pro.

Re: Alder Lake Core i9 processor is faster than the M1 Max

#118

Post by qbasic_forever »

devin wrote: post #85
gjsman-1000 wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple (if they were willing to expose a more wild side) should make an "M1 Pro Max Unlocked" board (or something like that) and just sell it as a bare, microATX board. It could cost exactly the same as the Mac mini for all I care, but if PC builders could use it in crazy cases and with liquid (or even liquid nitrogen) cooling, that would be so cool.

This will never happen.

It would not surprise me to see some future Mac pro use the M1 in a desktop form with exotic high wattage but near silent cooling (liquid, air or otherwise). These chips are fantastic for video and media work and really need to get put into more workstation-like form factors.

Re: Alder Lake Core i9 processor is faster than the M1 Max

#119

Post by lmm »

chii wrote: post #11
dijit wrote: post #3

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~ This is not the victory that the title implies. 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.

the fact is, apple hardware is not _that_ expensive relative to what you get for the money. Their supply chain is super optimized, and it's hard to beat them on price if a competitor decides to try (at the same quality that is).

If the exact combination of specs that you want is one of their handful of available configurations, apple hardware pricing is fine. But if you start from what you want to do, most of the time the cheapest mac that does what you want (which will probably be vastly overpowered in some area you don't care about) will be much more expensive than the cheapest PC that does what you want.

Re: Alder Lake Core i9 processor is faster than the M1 Max

#120

Post by adam_arthur »

shawnz wrote: post #102
adam_arthur wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point is obvious. M1 is not more powerful due to a better design, but simply due to more modern manufacturing process. Otherwise you would see a much larger gap in performance.

So it's merely equally as good as the previous market leader's flagship product in every way except litography, where it exceeds them? Are you implying that's not something to be impressed about just because lithography is not a property of the architecture?

Your comment is unclear.

Apple's contribution to M1 was the design. TSMC built the next gen fabs, and gets credit for the manufacturing.

You can't compare viability or success of the processor design when you compare cross fab generations. It's apples to oranges.

You can state that M1 is better, which is true, but it doesn't follow at all that it's due to the design component.

It could very well be that moving Intel's design to TSMC's fab would lead to it running circles around M1

I mean this is pretty obvious stuff, but these threads always end up full of people that don't understand hardware very well

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