Intel Alder Lake Mobility CPU Faster Than Apple M1 Max
wccftech.com
wccftech.com
Not only because M1 is at TSMC "5nm" (which is probably equivalent to Intel 7nm) but also because this happens every time intel gets kicked to the curb.
"Guys, don't go AMD, the new Intel CPU will be faster"
When the product arrives it usually comes with a huge trade-off such as thermals and power consumption and doesn't do the performance originally claimed anyway.
This has happened after every Ryzen launch, suspiciously only a day or so after each event. It's so obvious and I don't think I'm going to fall for that again.
No more promises: Goodbye Intel, I'll see you when your product can be in my hands and do what you claim.
To be fair, for years and years, new Intel CPUs were faster/better/whatever. What you remember as "kicked to the curb" was really something more like an occasionally great product in a sea of mediocrity where the industry was having terrible trouble competing. Someone would have a chip out with great reviews, and then the new Intel architecture would ship and everyone would forget about it.
The current environment where they lag in almost all the high end product spaces is very much a novelty.
What time period or space are you talking about here? Because that did not happen in the last 10 years for consumer and server processors. The last decade saw AMD with the FX processors failing to be competitive, at first single threaded, over time also multi-threaded and in performance per watt. Then after many years Ryzen came out and was at first just surprisingly competitive, then plainly better in every metric. And that's where we are now. The whole back-and-forth you are describing did not happen at all, and there were only AMD and Intel anyway, not "someone" or multiple players.
Intel hadn't shipped a dedicated GPU in >20 years (until the low-end DG1 last year) and their integrated graphics were anemic at best for most of that time period.
"2-4 years behind Nvidia" would be pretty impressive of a leap to have been aiming for in some meeting a few years ago.
I don't expect to be purchasing their DG2/"Arc Alchemist" when it launches in a few months, but if it's remotely competitive with mid-range current generation cards (as has been rumored/claimed), that'll be pretty impressive to my mind, to basically enter a completely new market segment for them and have a product that's even worth discussing.
Sounds pretty normal to me. Why would a company enter a new market if they don’t have a product people want?
I can’t think of any company that launched a new product by announcing “We don’t have anything competitive.”
Am I misunderstanding your comment? (Or reality.)
Roll your product out with a huge array of confusing names like i9-115479k that nobody can really follow. Nobody has the money to buy all of these products, so nobody can truly claim that none of your products are better than the competition, even if none of them offer a better price:performance:consumption ratio.
And even if somebody does call you out on it... well, don't worry! The next release is going to be even better. Just you wait.
When Apple moved from Motorola to IBM PPC: Motorola soon to release super fast chip updates!
When Apple moved from IBM PPC to intel: IBM soon to release super fast chip updates!
When Apple moved from Intel to M1: Intel soon to release super fast chip updates!
These companies need to release this press coverage - they’re publicly traded and need this.
The fact though is that right now people are using the Max, of course I’d expect some unreleased future chip to be faster.
However even the slower M1’s are still attractive because of the myriad of other benefits they bring: true mobility chips, huge battery life, quiet operation: the Air doesn’t even have a fan, boots/wakes/video switches are seamless, and the special sauce: the chips merge general purpose computing with application specific computing: apple will always be able to generate a tailored product for their audiences.
And it should go without saying: the pro desktops are certain to have compelling performance, and we can expect M2, M3 and so on to continually advance from where we are today.
Moving away from intel wasn't about performance alone, it was about taking control of their own product’s direction.
The article just says some future chip, with unknown memory, at some unspecified power level and cooling solution, will be able to eke out a benchmark win against the part Apple is shipping today in laptops.
Imagine if that wasn't true. THAT would be news.
Can we have Alder lake’s power per watt metrics?
Can we see the size of the laptops it will be installed in?
Will it be able to reach the same performance while on battery, like the new MacBook Pros?
C’mon, I understand Intel is in a push to counter the Intel-is-screwed narrative, but their comms department should try to do better than this old school benchmark “leaks” post, with cherry picked comparisons and such.
I can understand the “they’re an underdog, so they deserve some money even if their products are not the absolute best”, but casting Intel as the poor underdog being steamrolled by their competition because they cannot get the latest and greatest is strange, to say the least.
Right now, it seems to me that Intel is behind both on the node and on the architecture vs M1 (and AMD). I expect them to eventually fix the node (or just buy from TSMC) but if they don't fix the latter that's a big deal.
From the POV of buying a CPU/laptop today, absolutely, power comparison and performance both are essential.
I’m an Intel bear on their existing markets - mainly because even if they achieve parity with TSMC the lead is gone and others will take market share.
I’m more positive on the Intel GPU business though given the potential huge demand for ML compute.
From a historical point of view, a systematic shift to hotter, more power-hungry chips was never a good sign (see for example the various Pentium 4s and the successive incarnations of Bulldozer and Piledriver). I hope it's a stopgap and that they have a new Core 2 masterpiece being readied, but let's not kid ourselves: it does not look good. the Physics of heat transfer put a limit to the gains in performance you can achieve if you don't also increase efficiency. It's cold comfort to know that your CPU would be wonderful if cooled with liquid nitrogen when your desktop throttles under load.
https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/AMD-Ryzen-7-PRO-5850U-v...
AMD 5850U 1253 scores vs Apple M1 1004 scores
Waiting for apple fanboys telling me something like "but TDP is not a good measure"...
I think this might be the comparison you were after? https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/AMD-Ryzen-7-PRO-5850U-v...
Beyond that, almost everything that does signal processing of some shape or another (audio, video, whatever) is multithreaded these days, so that one's out too. Compiling code is multi-process too.
I actually struggle to think of important work loads that are single-threaded these days. Obviously most simple apps are, but mainly because they don't use enough CPU to bother optimizing. We're more than a decade into multi-core systems being the norm and most CPU-heavy apps have taken advantage of that.
I'd go one step further and say that if modern apps are doing that that they should move the CPU heavy tasks out of the message thread. (And most have, again, since we're like 10-15 years into multi-core systems being the default.)
Those measures should use something like `powerstat` results standardizing other conditions - in fact, they should use benchmarking (just like the numerator of the numbers you report does, but not the denominator). This system here has a TDP of 6W, but uses 3.3W during light use, and peaks around 7.5W.
Sure, there could be a literal interpretation of "Performance/Power" which somehow could link speed and TDP (benchmarking at the same stated TDP), but (°) it would be imprecise as TDP is an estimate (so consumption should be benchmarked) and (°) it would not represent some more useful scenarios like "which system allows squeezing more working time out of a battery" (which is not represented by considering maximums - especially given technologies like big.LITTLE).
So unfortunately TDP has basically become a marketing term and we're back to literally measuring power usage instead. Which of course gets complicated when you consider that different machines have wildly different heat management systems.
[0] https://www.anandtech.com/show/16959/intel-innovation-alder-...
> Waiting for apple fanboys telling me something like "but TDP is not a good measure"...
Not an Apple fan, but TDP is not even a measurement, it's a specification of the heat dissipation required for that CPU. So in theory it corresponds to the maximum power dissipated by the CPU under load, but in practice two machines with the same TDP may be equipped with differently dimensioned heatsinks which will influence your metric. You should consider using a real average power consumption measurement to establish your metric.
I think this isn't quite right - TDP is the amount of heat the system needs to be able to dissipate in order to prevent thermal throttling at a given base speed. If the system can dissipate more (and provide more power), chips can clock higher to a turbo or boost speed.
1. Base Power and Turbo Power. Finally a simple term so we dont have to constantly argue about TDP and PL1 / PL2. Which still happens fairly often on HN. And some of us have been ranting about this for almost a decade.
2. + 19% IPC improvement vs 11900K which is basically an Icelake. Or ~10% improvement over TigerLake ( Which was never made available on Desktop )
3. PCI-E 5 and DDR5. Intel went from falling behind in PCI-E offering to leaping ahead of AMD. We should expect PCI-E 5.0 SSD shipping soon after ( 14 - 16GBps )
4. Chipset is on 14nm. No USB 4 or Thunderbolt 4. But integrated WiFi 6E MAC.
5. For those interested, this put Alder Lake, on a Desktop Platform, with Intel 7nm High Performance Node, at roughly 20-25W per Performance Core. With a ( non-verified ) Geekbench Score fairly similar ( ~6% faster ) to M1 HP Core. The Apple M1, on a TSMC 5nm Low Power node, at roughly 5W per core.
6. It will be interesting to see how the new efficiency cores perform. Which is basically a new generation Atom Core. These were previously scheduled for a Graviton like 64 - 128 Core chip on server. Not sure if that is still the case with Intel's chiplet strategy or what they called Tiles.
7. Worth wondering, Alder Lake was originally scheduled on Intel 7nm or what is now called Intel 4/3nm in 2019. What would happen had Intel not been so badly managed? But if that didn't happen, Pat Gelsinger may never be back at Intel.
8. AMD Zen 4, also with DDR5 and PCI-E 5.0 will be coming in late 2022. Depending on Intel's pace of execution, which seems to be getting better and better every time Pat Gelsinger provides an update, AMD may have some tough competition.
The x4 lanes usually used for m.2 SSDs are PCIe4.
I mean, those literal nm measurements had no reasonably obvious basis in measurement for either intel or TSMC even before the intel rebrand, so...
It'd be nice if they advertised with a few real benchmarks (e.g. logic density + sram density, some kind of clockspeed metric, some kind of powerleakage metric)... but as is, it's just a branch anyhow.
Whether it "is" a 10nm process depends on what your definition of "is" is ;-). It's certainly not the case that a transistor is 10nm large, not even close.
Of course, this is probably all intentional from Intel's point of view (letting people say "Intel 7nm" rather than "Intel 7").
I believe Intel is still counting on using x4 PCIE4 for SSDs. I wonder if the PCI-E 5 x16 makes any difference for the GPUs?
DDR5 may bring in nice capacity boosts. However, I read somewhere that at lower capacities it is almost indistinguishable perf wise from high-end DDR4.
The key to M1's attraction is the cohesiveness of its implementation. Apple can make MacOS tightly knit to the heterogenous core types and caches. and essentially gate keep applications to behave optimally. From Intel's announcements, it looks like Intel came up with Thread Director to _advice_ Windows on how to schedule stuff and leave it to MS to implement things. Not sure how that synergy is going to take shape. Perhaps Linux will come out and eat this.
if AMD can improve on Zen 3 and come up with Zen 4, they already provide much more PCI-E lanes and ECC on DDR4/DDR5 memory support, with better than intel multi-threading perf. Competition sure is nice!
In short, 35-45W is a pipe-dream if you’re pushing the chip. I personally doubt it gets near 200W though…
Intel has always used TDP as normal TDP under baseline usage. They have now introduced a term called Turbo Power or previously known as PL2, when you max out the CPU to better reflect on true TDP.
And I should have wrote it better. It was compared to i9-12900K on Desktop which has a Turbo Power of 240W.
But on a single core basis, the difference should be minimal. The Mobile CPU will still uses ~20W max assuming information and Geekbench number being equal. We will have to wait for final review to confirm.
>So someone sent you some bullshit in the mail and you jizzed all over yourself. It means nothing unless you tested it. Anyone can make a graph and fill it with whatever number they choose. Intel has been making up numbers for more than a decade.
The next 5-10 years will have rapid innovation where you'll see ever growing caches and/or unified caches, higher bit interconnects (a la 512bit ddr5 bus on the m1 max), and a bigger emphasis on heterogeneous computing.
Nano ribbons and better gaa should give another boost in 3-5years or so but we're rapidly approaching an end to what we can do.
I'm not sure I can follow this line of reasoning. If ARM chips will always be more efficient, then how can you continue stating comparable battery life.
Moreover, there is no mention of TDP. Past flagship Intel processors have been fighting thermal throttling on mobile devices, and it's already been demonstrated that the M1 Max chips don't run into throttling even under load.
It's interesting to see first benchmarks of the new Alder Lakes chips, but we will see how well they work in real products, i.e. with thermal and other constraints.
Hey it’s also 3% faster than the M1 Max!
The M1 was released in Nov of 2020, if rumors are true, we're due an M2 in Feb of 2022.
This is a bit confusing, are they suggesting that laptops with this Alder Lake Mobility CPU will have "rougly comparable battery life" to M1 Max Macbook Pros, with better performance, despite having worse power efficiency?
This made me curious so I looked it up and found this bit on FAA's web site:
> Size limits: Lithium metal (non-rechargeable) batteries are limited to 2 grams of lithium per battery. Lithium ion (rechargeable) batteries are limited to a rating of 100 watt hours (Wh) per battery. These limits allow for nearly all types of lithium batteries used by the average person in their electronic devices. With airline approval, passengers may also carry up to two spare larger lithium ion batteries (101–160 Wh) or Lithium metal batteries (2-8 grams). This size covers the larger after-market extended-life laptop computer batteries and some larger batteries used in professional audio/visual equipment.
What do you mean by this? I have an 8th gen i5u in an HP laptop at work, and it's been driving an external 4k@60Hz screen for years. It has no dedicated GPU at all, just the integrated UHD 620 or something like that.
It can even daisy chain two external displays, in addition to the integrated panel. Not sure if it can drive two external 4k like this, I only have FHD + 4K to test.
The display is an LG, can't remember the model, but it worked with multiple other displays, HP, Dell, etc.
Your issue may be related to the connection. The limitation of 30 Hz makes me think you're connecting via HDMI. If that's all you have, you're SoL.
4k@60 requires HDMI 2, but Intel CPUs only recently have got that. 8th gen certainly doesn't have it.
You need DisplayPort for this to work. Laptops don't often have DP connectors, but they may have USB-C and/or Thunderbolt with DP alt-mode. This is what I use, hence the DP-xxx output name.
If you look closely, there's the DP logo next to the USB-C connector for my particular model: https://wu-tc-shop.com/WebRoot/Store11/Shops/a31626df-5333-4...
I'm not sure what you're on about in regards to 4k needing a dGPU. That's not true.
What do you mean by this? I started using 4k screen with my shitty employer-issued Intel-based Lenovo laptop more than 4 years ago.
Also, contrary to popular belief the A14 and it's child/sibling the M1 isn't made of magic and the "double in every stuff" each generation train has long gone away ( see A15 ). The M1 is great, performance per watt is really great, but the "tech advantages" Apple has are due to Intel's horrible track record as a tech company in the last decade.
I think the M1 was another "AMD moment" for Intel, I'm mildly optimistic they are starting to get their shit together. While I'm mildly certain Apple is starting to suffer from the same rot Intel has been suffering.
Tech advantage is not what drives sales in laptop market. Price does. Unless Apple comes up with a $600 entry-level MacBook SE, to think that "Apple will dominate the laptop" is just absurd.
That's a very short-sighted view. The fact of the matter is that there's no offer from Apple in the $800 segment.
There's also a lack of 2-in-1 devices (and arguably the iPad family cannot fill this niche as long as iPadOS remains dumbed-down).
So unless the entire Laptop market shifts to $1000+ devices exclusively, there's no way this will happen.
Unfortunately I cannot provide you with hard sales data, since the relevant market reports cost upwards $2.500, but their overall market share is about 10% [0] so go figure.
Apple isn't in my section of the market. I appreciate the technological advances that they are making - they're good. But it's not for me.
Still, if ever they manage to at least be competitive on the process node front, that might make things interesting...
As is, while technically impressive they even managed this, it's not like the difference is large enough to be impactful.
The big elephant in the room for Intel is the x86 instruction set. It's a technical debt that is not addressed in anyway as far as I can see. Until then, we'll have to choose between the Apple way or the inefficient way.
All those caveats aside:
- https://www.cpu-monkey.com/en/cpu-amd_ryzen_7_pro_5850u-1905 - https://www.cpu-monkey.com/en/cpu-apple_a13_bionic-1654
Geekbench scores: A13: 1336 single, 3187 multi 5850u: 1414 single, 8140 multi
And there are lots of tricks apple uses to keep power consumption down _in addition to_ using arm; and that's partially why it does better than e.g. qualcomm. But many of those tricks aren't somehow arm or apple exclusive; they're just a question of (expensive) engineering or die size - things that aren't fundamental to intels usage of x86.
I mean, it might well be that x86 hits some ceiling well before arm's ISA does, but I don't see actual evidence of that being a huge factor yet. At the very least, it feels like it's clear the process node helps, as does all kinds of other engineering, but that the impact of the ISA is not as obvious.
Course, I might just be missing the obvious evidence, sure ;-).
Despite my disappointment in Intel in the past years, I can only be happy about them pushing PCIE5 and DDR5. This confirms my next PC upgrade, although likely on a future Ryzen will be a spicy one.
But it does mean you can push out X TFlops at 20W for 5x longer given the same battery than you can at 100W, no?
Economy of consumption remains a "hot" topic.
https://energycodeace.com/site/custom/public/reference-ace-t...
I don't see California banning keeping neon signs on at night when buildings and shops are closed. Their threat is pure posturing and pretending that the problem lies on individuals when the most egregious power wastes are done in companies.
I could have bought SoCs way before Apple decided it was a perfect way to get people to have to buy brand new hardware every time. They're not new technology.
Additionally, Tiger Lake is merely LPDDR-compatible, not forced. You can have a Tiger Lake with regular DDR, and upgrades are easy to do. So, once again, _some_ Alder Lake designs will have soldered LPDDR5, which is low grade DDR4.
This is still not DDR5.
Specs wise, LPDDR4X would be indeed, able to beat out an average DDR4-2800 under certain circumstances. Those circumstances are quad channel (that the M1 does not have) and 3733 MHz (which the M1 does have). That of course goes out the window if you spec some DDR4-3200 and quad channel it too, which will blow LPDDR4X out of the water.
And of course, once again, you make this a laptop thing when the original post is about people believing the M1/M2 would scale linearly with power usage and be a strong contender to desktop CPUs. So, no, there's no DDR5 in the M1, its LPDDR4X is not faster than DDR4, and please stop trying to force feed me the Apple kool aid, this has never been about battery life.