abhibeckert

hackintoisier said:

Alder lake already beats m1 max at many tasks.

On what tasks? Alder lake does ok a lot of benchmarks (if you ignore power consumption). But on real world tasks M1 is usually significantly faster, not because of math performance, but fundamentals like memory latency and bandwidth.

The power thing is critical - Apple is holding back by making sure the CPU/GPU rarely draw a significant amount of power. On benchmarks like Cinebench where Alder Lake just barely beats the M1 Pro Max, it's only drawing 11 Watts according to Anandtech. Which means it run the benchmark for about *9 hours* on battery. I'm not sure what an Alder Lake CPU draws, but I wouldn't be surprised if it's 10x more, maybe even starting at 20x more before thermal throttling kicks in.

The thing people defending Intel forget is Apple is perfectly capable of selling a Mac that lasts 2 hours under heavy load. They've been selling those Macs for years with Intel chips. Because Apple has decided to stop doing that, comparisons aren't really fair.

My prediction is when Apple starts shipping proper desktops on Apple Silicon, ones with a 980W power supply, then we'll really find out what Apple's chipset design team can do. And I don't think it's going to be pretty for Intel.