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Comment by TruthWillHurt | Hacker News Reader

Intel's stated TDPs are not accurate representations of how much power a chip actually uses. You can see in some of these Blender benchmarks the 12900k hitting >230W average:

https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/intel-core-i9-12900k-an...

It's very workload-dependent, so it's difficult to say how much power a chip will draw in general. It's clear that Intel is still a bit of an energy hog, though.

- both Intel and AMD lie about TDP now, Intel much more than AMD

- 225 W is for the M1 Ultra Mac Studio, whole system power consumption - that includes powering the TB peripherals if they exist

- Intel numbers are just the CPU (not even including the chipset) and will only happen if you don't cool it enough and it has to throttle

So yes, I'd rather have a M1 (probably a Pro would be enough) on my desk than an i9 under it. But I am weird and like cool and quiet, not larger numbers.

The first thing I did with my M1 MBP was fire up my game of choice for the last twelve years. It performed adequately, and respectably, but the performance is not equal to my Nvidia 1060/70. Still, I shut off my modern i5+Nvidia desktop that day and haven't turned it on since.

MBP is too damn fast (holy shit the build times!!) and too damn quiet to go back. The M1 put the i5 in a headlock and had it begging for mercy without the slightest bit of effort.

One of Apple's major advantages, I think, is that they don't use very many shitty components. Meanwhile, OEMs always cheap out on components that don't produce the numbers that consumers understand -- hard drive? memory? Who cares! Here's the core count and clock frequency.

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