The Windows world has long been waiting for a true answer to Apple’s customs silicon, and the latest round of benchmarks shows that Intel might have delivered, but with a catch. As reported by MacWorld, Intel’s latest Alder Lake Core i9 laptop processor is actually faster than the Apple M1 Max, but not nearly as battery efficient.
In the tests, MacWorld compared a 14-inch MacBook Pro (with M1 Pro processor,) with the 14 inch MacBook Pro (with M1 Max Processor) against the MSI GE76 Raider laptop. This laptop comes configured with a 14-core Core i9-12900HK processor, and Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 Ti GPU; 32GB of DDR5/4800 RAM; 2TB NVMe.
The publication ran the laptops through Geekbench 5 and Cinebench R23, and in both cases, the Intel processor edged out Apple’s latest offerings. It is important to note, though, that these are all synthetic benchmarks, so the results do not equate to real-world performance. The differences also come down to just a couple of digits, adding to that skepticism.
Looking at their test results, the Alder Lake CPU scored 13,235 in Geekbench 5 multi-core testing. That’s a bit over the M1 Max’s 12,590 multi-core results. It’s even over the M1 Pro’s 12,544. Meanwhile, the single-core scores for the Alder Lake option came in at 1,838. It barely edges out the M1 Pro’s 1,778 and the M1 Max’s 1,774. Meanwhile, over on Cinebench, Intel’s processor netted a multi-core result of 15,981. That’s compared to 12,381 for the M1 Pro. There were no results for the M1 Max.
The caveats of these results are price, power, and battery life. While the results seem good on paper, The MSI laptop comes in close to $4,000 in price. In battery, meanwhile, the MSI was constantly running at 100 watts, whereas Apple’s M1 runs at 39. watts.
