Intel recently unveiled a new generation of Alder Lake chips, and these are proving to be true behemoths of power, so much so that the high-end i9-12900HK Alder processor managed to outperform Apple’s M1 Max over several benchmarks.
Intel previously said its new high-end Core i9-12900HK processor is faster than Apple’s M1 Max chip in the 16-inch MacBook Pro. According to PCWorld’s first tests of MSI’s GE76 Raider PC, which features Intel’s latest high-end chip, the i9-12900HK is indeed more powerful on many benchmarks such as Geekbench.
Indeed, the Core i9-12900HK processor scored a multi-core score of 12,707 points, while the M1 Max scored 12,244, or 7% less. Nevertheless, it seems that Intel forgot to specify that its chip is not better than the M1 Max on all aspects, including energy consumption.
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The energy efficiency of the Intel Core-i9-12900HK does not come close to the M1 Max chip
Although Intel’s processor is more powerful than Apple’s M1 Max chip, the Intel Core i9-12900HK only takes advantage when it sees its energy consumption increase. According to PCWorld measurements, running a Cinebench R23 benchmark, the i9-12900HK constantly exceeds the 100 mark and even briefly reaches 140 watts.
In comparison, the M1 Max chip present on Apple’s latest 2021 MacBook Pros does not would only consume about 40 watts, and yet offers slightly lower results than the Intel chip.
As you can imagine, with such energy consumption, the Intel chip brings down the autonomy of the laptops it equips. The new GE76 Raider, for example, only holds 6 hours offline video playback, against almost 21 hours for Apple’s 16-inch MacBook Pro.
It should nevertheless be noted that the MSI computer is also penalized by the consumption of its GPU, an RTX 3080 Ti. In terms of graphics, when you pair Alder Lake’s Core i9 chip with NVIDIA’s RTX 3080 Ti graphics card, the power difference with Apple’s chip is massive. The computer scores an OpenCL score of 143,594 points compared to 54,774 points for the 16-inch MacBook Pro. However, if only the Core i9-12900K’s integrated GPU is considered, Intel’s score drops to just 21,097 points.
Source: PC World
