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Comment by wefjioi3223O | Hacker News Reader

The new Alder Lake CPU from Intel for laptops is faster than M1 MAX:

https://wccftech.com/intel-alder-lake-mobility-cpu-benchmark...

So, nothing special about M1, especially if you consider that Adler Lake will use an older manufacturing process (7nm vs 5nm used by Apple).

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It’s slightly faster at considerably greater power usage — and, more importantly, it hasn’t shipped yet so we don’t know what the true availability or performance will be when it arrives next year. Apple soured on Intel in part due to repeated delays so while I hope that they ship on schedule at full volume, it certainly would not be unprecedented for them to be late or limited quantity.

Assuming a 100-watt battery and/or a 3.5-pound weight restriction, how many hours of battery life would you get from an Alder Lake laptop in those rendering tasks, in comparison to the M1 MAX laptop?

How many pounds of battery would an Alder Lake laptop required to match the uptime of the M1 MAX laptop performing those rendering tasks?

My mental napkin math suggests extremely unfavorable answers for an Alder Lake laptop, to the degree that the laptop's viability in the market would be severely compromised by sustaining the power and cooling required by Alder Lake for long-duration workloads such as rendering.

And it devours, what, 5X the power and generates far more heat and fan noise requiring a much thicker machine to house it? Also the integrated graphics will (going from Intel) be nowhere near as impressive as the M1 Max's graphics, so it's hardly competing on that front either.

Not really a victory there. Also, it hasn't even been released yet, so comparing hypothetical unreleased products isn't a good comparison to call released products you can actually buy "nothing special."

M1 MAX is not a low-power CPU. It consumes the whole 30 WATTs (!!!) and has an active cooling system. H-series CPUs from Intel have a TPD of 35 - 45 WATTS and this is almost the same as M1 MAX. According to your calculation, Intel CPU should consume 150 WATTs which is completely wrong.

Intel's Power consumption numbers are ideal case, they routinely go over that. https://www.anandtech.com/show/16680/tiger-lake-h-performanc...

By the way, Apple said their graphic card in M1 MAX has the same performance as mobile 3080 using much less power. But this was a lie. M1 MAX has only ~10 TFLOPS and 3080 has ~19 TFLOPS, so M1 MAX is almost twice slower than mobile 3080. So the whole superiority of M1 MAX is greatly overstated by fake numbers. and also don't forget - 3080 is almost a year old GPU.

"said their graphic card in M1 MAX has the same performance as mobile 3080 using much less power"

Apple never said it compared to a 3080 in Gaming Performance. People made conjectures that it could be roughly in that arena. In Productivity applications (work applications that use a GPU), there it's very close to a 3080.

Also, TFLOPS is a terrible number for performance because it depends on the level of precision and is highly variable on workload. Good luck loading, say, a 48GB 3D Model on a RTX 3090 - but a M1 Max would handle it fine. Similarly, the 10.8 TLOPs PlayStation 5 had better performance than the 12 TFLOPs Xbox Series X for months after launch.

Finally, as for many of the games that were compared - notice how many of them use MoltenVK, which is a Vulkan -> Metal translator that impacts performance. Then look at how many were x86, needing Rosetta translation on top of that. These weren't exactly the most native of game ports.

Your comments are like an evil crusade to burn down M1.

“Nothing special” compared to an unreleased Intel chip with higher power usage.

“Overstated by fake numbers” by choosing 1 metric and ignoring 99 others it’s better at.

You’re also a 2 hour account.

Is M1 vs Intel personal to you?

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