The first M1 Macs have been on the loose for almost three months now, and fear is taking hold at Intel. The company this week shared a detailed slide show of the benchmark results with Tom’s Hardware (by Six colors), with the aim of showing that there are several ways in which it still has an edge over Apple’s silicon … depending on how you look at things.
One of Intel’s focuses is what it calls “productivity”. The company compares its 11th generation “Tiger Lake” processors to Apple’s M1 for things like web browsing and using Microsoft Office. Intel says:
Comparing Microsoft Office 365, running native on Intel and Apple processors: The 11th Generation system performs some functions such as PDF export up to 2.3x faster (vs Apple M1)
Comparing the most popular web browser (Chrome), running native versions on Intel and Apple processors: The 11th generation system is more than 30% faster overall and almost 3x faster in the online photo enhancement subtest (vs Apple M1 )
Other Intel benchmarks also focus on things like creating content, using software from Adobe and Topaz Labs, as well as games.
Intel also compared the M1 to the Intel Evo, which is “its second generation update to Project Athena to make the best portable devices”.
There are some bizarre test results between the M1 and Evo, with Intel claiming that the M1 on the MacBook Pro failed in things like using Zoom and PowerPoint. Tom’s Hardware explains:
Intel claims that the M1 on the tested MacBook Pro failed eight of the 25 tests it uses, including “Switch to calendar” in Outlook, “start videoconferencing” in Zoom and “Select image menu” in PowerPoint. Intel workloads do not explain how they are performed, but they are also simple tasks that work very well on almost any modern processor, so they are strange choices. (I had many conferences on Zoom while testing the MacBook Pro without a problem.)
There are several things to keep in mind with this test. First, these tests were carried out by Intel and, therefore, should be treated with skepticism; it is clear that the company will select and choose specific tasks in which Intel chips may still perform better than Apple’s M1.
For example, Tom’s Hardware points out some suspicious choices that Intel made when testing battery life:
On battery life, Intel switched to an Intel Core i7-1165G7 notebook, the Acer Swift 5, instead of taking the Core i7-1185G7 in the white paper it used for performance testing. He also tested a MacBook Air. They ran Netflix streams and guides and found that the MacBook Air was ahead six minutes apart.
Intel did not list the MacBook Pro battery life. In our tests, this exceeded Intel PCs in hours.
Intel’s timing in launching this counter-argument to Apple Silicon is also intriguing. Jason Snell in Six colors points out that the M1 is a low-end chip for a low-end system, and Intel “only has a small window” to be able to find favorable comparisons:
Inconsistent test platforms, alternating arguments, missing data and the not-so-faint smell of despair. Today’s M1 processor is a low-cost chip for low-cost systems, so Intel only has a small window to compare favorably with those systems before Apple’s silicon Macs are launched and make their job much more difficult.
If interested, you can find Intel’s full slide show at Tom’s hardware.
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