News Intel's Core i9-12900HK Outpaces Apple's M1 Max, But There's a Catch

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peachpuff said:
A great man once said... "It don't matter if you win by an inch or a mile. Winning's winning."
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Except this isn't a drag race for Apple. They care about how you win. Do you think they want a thick as hell laptop for their Mac following? Apple must be laughing at this premise that Intel beat them by about 3% all around by using 3 times the energy. And the same will apply to whatever AMD can achieve with the Ry6H series; while better than Intel at power, I don't see them beating apple at power/performance. They'll be closer though.

So, as stated in the article, when these CPUs arrive to the 25W-45W range, then it'll be an interesting comparison.

Regards.
 
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It is not a clear win for Intel. Alder Lake is certainly a fast chip, but the jump in performance is to a large extend due to the much higher peak power draw. And when you are talking about a gaming laptop, the moment you unplug the laptop from the mains, the performance plunges big time. The Macbook Pro works and performs the same whether plugged in or on battery. As a desktop replacement, gaming laptops makes sense because not only is the laptop big and heavy, you need to lug along the 1 or sometimes 2 power adapter which are not small, not light to begin with. On the other hand, one can charge the MacBook Pro even with a 65W type C charger.
 
A couple of percentage points, at the cost of vastly greater power consumption?

Or, at best, maybe that "up to" 30% gain in CinebenchR23 - relatively wide variance in multiple runs... The M1 has a variance of only 52 points, and the Intel a variance of 1641 points... suggests it's not able to keep the wick cranked all the way up that steadily to me.

It doesn't say if the 94 watts from Intel is package power, or from the wall. If from the wall, than compared to the M1, it uses 136.8% more power.

If it's package power, Intel is using 176.5% more power.


Yeah, this is pretty laughable.
 
peachpuff said:
A great man also once said... Second place isn't winning.
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Then let me rephrase. Apple's race is power/performance ratio and not performance; think drifting vs drag, if you will. They care about slim and sleek designs and whether you and I agree to that philosophy or not, is moot. Even by "winning" in performance, as long as their power is off the roof for mobile, Apple will just laugh at them. So no, winning at performance alone won't sway Apple to get Intel into the Mac again.

Regards.
 
peachpuff said:
A great man once said... "It don't matter if you win by an inch or a mile. Winning's winning."
Click to expand...
peachpuff said:
A great man also once said... Second place isn't winning.
Click to expand...

I don't think that man/these men were really all that great. Sounds more like they were terribly misguided.

It's the same conundrum that exists for hot-rodders:
  • Cheap
  • Fast
  • Reliable
You can ONLY pick two.

That Intel didn't win. With the power consumption, it lost. Badly. We are, after all, talking about LAPTOP processors.
 
King_V said:
That Intel didn't win. With the power consumption, it lost. Badly. We are, after all, talking about LAPTOP processors.
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Alder Lake destroys the M1 in most of the software I use, because it would have to run through some sort of emulation mode on the M1 if it worked at all. The saying is comparing apples to oranges. In this case, it's comparing Apples to PC's which for most people is useless. Mac hardware is basically becoming a custom designed and optimized console to run a few key applications on macOS. Intel and AMD have to support 30+ years of legacy software. One would hope the purpose built system would be more efficient.
 
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Interesting that you did not give AMD the same sort of comparison...😉 Intel still is behind AMD in PPW. And in server chips, that's a huge win for AMD. I don't recall TH ever making that point, however...😉 It's OK...I don't really care, but thought I would mention it...😉

Do you guys at TH support links from the story pages to the forum topics anymore? They aren't showing up for me any longer at the end of your articles.
 
waltc3 said:
Interesting that you did not give AMD the same sort of comparison...😉 Intel still is behind AMD in PPW. And in server chips, that's a huge win for AMD. I don't recall TH ever making that point, however...😉 It's OK...I don't really care, but thought I would mention it...😉

Do you guys at TH support links from the story pages to the forum topics anymore? They aren't showing up for me any longer at the end of your articles.
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Why would THG mention a theoretical product from AMD that doesn't exist? What benchmarks and resultant scores would like Tom's to invent for this non-existent mobile GPU from AMD that beats an M1?
 
spongiemaster said:
Alder Lake destroys the M1 in most of the software I use, because it would have to run through some sort of emulation mode on the M1 if it worked at all. The saying is comparing apples to oranges. In this case, it's comparing Apples to PC's which for most people is useless. Mac hardware is basically becoming a custom designed and optimized console to run a few key applications on macOS. Intel and AMD have to support 30+ years of legacy software. One would hope the purpose built system would be more efficient.
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So, then, Intel wins in narrow corner cases where outdated x86-based software is required. I'm sure there are narrow corner cases where the M1 will destroy Alder Lake.

I don't think you're making a good case for Intel here.
 
waltc3 said:
Interesting that you did not give AMD the same sort of comparison...😉 Intel still is behind AMD in PPW. And in server chips, that's a huge win for AMD. I don't recall TH ever making that point, however...😉 It's OK...I don't really care, but thought I would mention it...😉

Do you guys at TH support links from the story pages to the forum topics anymore? They aren't showing up for me any longer at the end of your articles.
Click to expand...
spongiemaster said:
Why would THG mention a theoretical product from AMD that doesn't exist? What benchmarks and resultant scores would like Tom's to invent for this non-existent mobile GPU from AMD that beats an M1?
Click to expand...


I say "Uh, what?" to both of these posts, because:

https://www.tomshardware.com/features/amd-vs-intel-cpus

One of the wins AMD has here, and they make a very specific point of it, is power consumption.

As we can see, the Alder Lake chips consume far less power than the Rocket Lake chips. Overall, Intel has reduced its power consumption from meme-worthy to an acceptable level. Besides, Alder Lake is much faster than the previous-gen chips, earning it some forgiveness.
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Winner: AMD. In judging AMD vs Intel CPU performance per watt, It's impossible to overstate the importance of having the densest process node paired with an efficient microarchitecture, and TSMC's 7nm and AMD's Zen 3 are the winning combinations. The latest Ryzen processors consume less power on a performance-vs-power basis, which equates to less heat generation. That eases cooling requirements.
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King_V said:
I say "Uh, what?" to both of these posts, because:

https://www.tomshardware.com/features/amd-vs-intel-cpus

One of the wins AMD has here, and they make a very specific point of it, is power consumption.
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Good, I missed that--but what I had in mind was a similar title for an article--like this one, only favoring AMD and pointing out "the catch" to Alder Lake in comparison. That's kind of obvious, isn't it?
 
waltc3 said:
Interesting that you did not give AMD the same sort of comparison...😉 Intel still is behind AMD in PPW. And in server chips, that's a huge win for AMD.
Click to expand...
For several years now server upgrades are mostly GPUs because everything is AI centric now. The use cases of plain cpu compute are very limited and in the cases where power efficiency is really important most have switched over to arm long ago.
It's a huge win for AMD in a small niche of the whole server market and not in the whole server market.
 
spongiemaster said:
Alder Lake destroys the M1 in most of the software I use, because it would have to run through some sort of emulation mode on the M1 if it worked at all. The saying is comparing apples to oranges. In this case, it's comparing Apples to PC's which for most people is useless. Mac hardware is basically becoming a custom designed and optimized console to run a few key applications on macOS. Intel and AMD have to support 30+ years of legacy software. One would hope the purpose built system would be more efficient.
Click to expand...
While this is true, this further paints a poorer picture for Intel when it runs software natively. I feel software developers won't mind optimising their software to run well on Mac despite the much smaller user base as compare to the likes of Windows. Having said that, people using or planning to use a Mac should also be aware of the limitations as you mentioned. Native applications that supports M1 out of the box runs very well, but when having to be translated by Rosetta means some performance lost.

For me, if it is for work and for the purpose of doing things like photo and video editing, and for on the go use, my go to machine will be a Macbook. The battery life vs performance is impossible to overlook. However if it is for gaming and as a desktop replacement, this may be a good option.
 
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King_V said:
I don't think that man/these men were really all that great. Sounds more like they were terribly misguided.

It's the same conundrum that exists for hot-rodders:
  • Cheap
  • Fast
  • Reliable
You can ONLY pick two.

That Intel didn't win. With the power consumption, it lost. Badly. We are, after all, talking about LAPTOP processors.
Click to expand...
A great noble man once said... lighten up 😂
 
watzupken said:
I feel software developers won't mind optimising their software to run well on Mac despite the much smaller user base as compare to the likes of Windows.
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ARM is RISC which means it only supports some instructions, those that it does support run very fast and very efficient, if you can run your software only with those then you are golden, but if you need more complex instructions for your code or just different instructions then there is not much you can do in ways of optimizing, you have to string together multiple instructions that are available to get to the result you need, this is always going to be slower and less efficient, there is nothing you can do about it.
That's why ARM hasn't been widely adopted in the last 40 years.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reduced_instruction_set_computer
In computer engineering, a reduced instruction set computer (RISC) is a computer designed to simplify the individual instructions given to the computer in order to realise a task. Unlike the instructions given to a complex instruction set computer (CISC), with a RISC computer, a task might require more instructions (code) in order to realise a task, because the individual instructions are written in simpler code. The goal is to offset the need to process more instructions by increasing the speed of each instruction, in particular, implementing an instruction pipeline may be simpler given simpler instructions.[1]
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