But at what thermal, power and monetary price?
Edit: @deepnotderp[1] found the power adjusted basis: https://mobile.twitter.com/witeken/status/147844103741682893...
Edit: @deepnotderp[1] found the power adjusted basis: https://mobile.twitter.com/witeken/status/147844103741682893...
Its impressive, but:
Generally, take Intel's marketing material with a grain of salt. They're notorious for exaggerating, cherry-picking, and out-right lying in marketing materials.
Related to that: While both the M1 Max & 12900HK have on-board iGPUs, the M1 Max has an especially powerful GPU for its class; one of the best iGPUs ever produced. That's going to contribute massively to package power draw, which is what they're measuring on the X-axis; if the Xe G7 can't compete, then these graphs are disingenuous to the overall experience some customers would be looking for (alternatively, other customers will be going dGPU anyway, so it doesn't matter).
Related to that: Its unclear from the chart whether this is per-core relative perf or entire package and multithreaded perf. I'm guessing the latter, due to the size of that x-axis arc and because its roughly where we'd expect a 12th gen 14/20 configuration to land; that's an obscene amount of threads for mobile, far outpacing the 10/10 in M1 Max. In fact, I'd argue: if this is a multithread test, a 40% increase in cores w/ a 100% increase in SMT threads only arriving at a miniscule (~5%?) jump in perf at similar power draw is average, not good. The single-core perf, even on their high-draw cores under load, may be rather poor; so its end-of-day effectiveness may be very workload dependent.
Overall, I'm hopeful the real-world performance matches the expectations they've set, and I'm bullish on Intel's strategy. Chip manufacturing is hard, but TSMC is becoming a bottleneck for both Apple & AMD. Hyper-optimizing large processes may work out for them; but the proof will be in the pudding.
https://www.anandtech.com/show/17024/apple-m1-max-performanc...
Here are some power, prices, and other things can be viewed here about them.
https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/compare.html?pro...
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.
Recently I was at an airport a few hours before my flight and I ended up just playing games on a food court table. No need to huddle around one of the few seats with power points. Also great to pick up and move to a different room if the current one is noisy without needing to grab your charger as well.
And even in the office, sometimes there will be a multi hour session in a meeting room which is enough to drain everyone's intel macbooks flat.
Honestly, my past experience with Intel mobile CPUs versus my current experience with my new MBP says I will never buy one of the former again, ever, unless it's otherwise a truly special machine or I have no choice.
I will admit that I'm not really the target market for the big, chunky laptops that can make a 75W+ TDP anything but miserable, because I have a desktop machine that still wipes the floor with anything in that segment. The truth about the M1 Pro/Max SoCs is that they won't give you the absolute hottest performance around in CPU or GPU, but they will give you legitimately great performance along with other attributes that are best-in-class taken together, mainly size, weight, battery endurance, and thermals. And those things do matter to a lot of people.
Start a call at 10% battery? Will definitely have to interrupt to go plug in.
I want performance and battery.
Edit: I went a total of 64 minutes after hitting 10%. Unfortunately the whole OS crashed at that point. I have been having issues with running 2 network extensions simultaneously, and I have a feeling the crash was more related to that than to running out of battery.
It took 10s after I plugged it into the mains for it to respond to the power button. Had this been a regular hibernate instead of a crash, I would have expected to be back at a fully usable desktop in less than 30s total. Unfortunately it took about 1 minute to fully boot and reopen all apps, which all things considered is not bad at all.
I wouldn't necessarily bet on that. RRP for the chip they're talking about is $635; it's the top end. M1 Pro machines (the Max is a red herring; the cheaper Pros have the same CPU performance) start at $2k. Generally, laptops containing Intel's most expensive mobile chips cost more than that.
Like, it's probably in principle possible to produce a laptop containing the offending chip for $1320, but I doubt you'll see many of them.
Power use also has implications for the thermal envelope. Most laptops using Intel's current top-end chips can't sustain the top-end performance for long at all; they need to throttle to avoid melting.
I don't see how Intel can come up with a macbook air equivalent at a price of $350.
The 14" pro looks great, but can anyone using it tell me whether the fan ever turns on?
So, it doesn't seem to turn on almost ever for me. I've had it for over a month and I've never heard it turn on. I've seen it turn on (via the menu-bar monitor) and tried to listen for the fan and just can't hear anything. I'll be using it with the vents covered by a blanket and it doesn't seem to notice.
It's one of the reasons that I love this machine. My 2020 Intel MacBook Pro would run those fans all the time making lots of noise. A web page would randomly start using a lot of CPU and my battery would drain, things would slow down, and the fans would sing their song. The magic of my new M1 Pro machine is that nothing seems to phase it. It's not like I had a crappy old laptop for comparison. I had a 2.4GHz Intel MacBook Pro that was over $2,000.
I was wondering if the fan would go on and it might go on more if you're doing a lot of high-end rendering, but it doesn't for my usage. IntelliJ, Windows VMs, whatever, it mostly stays off and sometimes turns on, but low enough that I can't hear it even with my ear to the vents. It feels magical.
I have an i7 16" intel and maxing out a single core will spin up the fans in short order. Maxing out multiple cores is kind of absurd how much noise and throttling happens