The latest Intel Core i9 chip does better than the Apple Silicon M1 Max processor but consumes significantly more.
One of the main reasons why Apple decided to stop using processors Intel and to switch to its own chips is that the Cupertino company did not want to be at the mercy of the development schedule of the American founder.
Especially since in recent years, Intel has had to deal with a number of delays which, in turn, have affected Apple and its device update schedules.
Latest Intel Core i9 chip outperforms Apple Silicon M1 Max processor
With the Apple Silicon M1 line of chips, we’ve seen in a number of benchmarks how these perform and how they outperform Intel’s creations, even surpassing them quite easily.
But Intel does not seem to have said its last word. Indeed, according to recent Geekbench 5 benchmarks, it looks like the company’s latest Core i9 processor does better than Apple’s M1 Max chip.
but consumes much more
The Core i9-12900HK processor scored a multi-core Un score of 12,707 while the M1 Max “settled” with 12,244, which is a difference of 4%. That being said, the scores achieved on these benchmarks only tell part of the story, so to speak.
According to PCWorld’s tests on the Cinebench R23 benchmark, the Intel processor consistently displayed a consumption of around 100 W, with a peak observed at around 140 W.
On the other hand, with the same benchmark made by AnandTech, the Apple Silicon M1 Max chip showed only 40 W, which is less than half of the consumption of the Intel chip.
This means that, although Intel’s processors are indeed (a little) faster, they consume considerably more power than Apple’s chips. This directly affects the autonomy if they are embedded in laptops or the electricity bill if integrated in desktop computers.
This does not mean that this Intel processor is not good, there are advantages and disadvantages, with very different use cases, but it is an aspect to take into account.