Clash of Chips: Apple's M1 Max vs. Intel's 12th Gen Core i9

The first part of the title of this story probably had you thinking this was a Pringles vs Doritos vs Lays brawl. Maybe one day, we shall see that clash.

If you’re a bit familiar with the phone and laptop tech scene, then you know that for years Apple always has one battle or the other with some big tech brands. These battles are either held in a courtroom, subtly in ads or on social media. From when they battled with Samsung for years to their most recent battle with Facebook just last year. They even battled with the FBI at some point. Does everybody actually hate Chris or do they just hate Apple?

Unsurprisingly, I bring you yet another battle.

The M1 and Intel

After 15 years, Apple decided to bring the bromance, between intel and its Macs, to an end. In 2020, Apple announced their yearly laptop releases: a MacBook Air, a MacBook Pro and a Mac Mini. As expected, they looked exactly like their predecessors. The only new thing was that they all had new chips.

Apple created their own chips and decided to start using them in newer installments of their laptops and desktops. They had already been making their own phone chips for years and decided to do the same for their laptops.

If you know Apple, you know that they have one of the best ecosystems of technology products in the world. They make life very easy for their users with seamless integrations that target overall convenience. Of course, this comes at a cost but nothing good comes cheap. Apple’s software is optimized to work with their hardware and this ensures efficiency.

A trend that continued with their game-changing M1. Its efficiency boasted numbers never seen before.

The M1 Macs have longer battery lives and better performances than their equivalent Intel predecessors.

As a response, Intel launched its 12th-gen mobile processors earlier in 2022. This launch resulted in very powerful chips that aim to compete with Apple’s best. Even though Intel has been King of the hill for many years, the chip market is buzzing with competition.

Without further ado, let’s jump into the numbers.

Tests

Tests were carried out by PCWorld, and Anandtech and generated results from the benchmark companies. These were the major laptop units used:

• MSI GE76 Raider (14-core Core i9-12900HK / RTX 3080 Ti Laptop @175TGP/ 32GB DDR5/4800)
• Apple Macbook Pro 16 (10-core M1 Max / 64GB LPDDR5/6400)

Two other laptop units were used for better reference of performance results.

Note that for all test charts, longer bars mean better performance.

The first comparison is Cinebench R23. Results sourced from Anandtech and PCWorld were used. The benchmark is used to measure a CPU’s rendering performance. This is a stress test for 10 minutes. CPUs with more cores win.

Spoiler Alert: Intel’s chip wins the first round by around 25% better performance.

Since the Intel chip has more cores, it was bound to win this round.

Cinebench R23 was also run using a single thread to compare CPU’s best cores. In this test, the new 12th-gen Core i9-12900HK also outperforms the M1 Max. A slightly older 11th-gen Core i9-11980HK also outperforms the M1 Max in this test, by a relatively small margin,

The next test was Primate Lab’s Geekbench 5 benchmark. First up is the multi-core performance of all the laptops. For the MacBook Pro, the result was gotten from Geekbench’s database. This isn’t as reliable as one from a known outlet. Since results are self-reported, the circumstances under which they were run are unknown. Therefore, higher scores reported for the M1 Max were picked.

Yet again, the 12th-gen Core i9-12900HK wins this round by a very little percentage. But no matter how small the margin is, there can only be one winner.

There was also a report on the single-core performance from Geekbench. The core count doesn’t really matter because the result you see is the best performance of each CPU’s best cores. The M1 Max loses in this round again in what was a really close call. The other lower units tested didn’t also do too bad when matched against these super chips.

Now onto GPU tests. The next test is called the Geekbench’s Compute performance benchmark. It evaluates GPU performance, simulating workloads like image processing, computer vision, and machine learning. A purple bar represents the integrated graphics and a green bar for the discrete graphics chips of the Core i9 and Ryzen laptops. The M1 Max is strictly an integrated design. Therefore, both bars are identical.

The last test is focused on content creators that use the Adobe Premiere software. Results were compared and combined from PCWorld and PugetBench. Results were picked on the higher end of the scale for the MacBook Pro since it was from publicly sourced data.

Conclusion

Intel is a clear winner in this battle. While chips don’t lie, they also never tell the full story. These numbers give a very good idea of how powerful the new Intel chip is, but not all metrics are measured. Real usage by real users gives the most accurate performance benchmarks.

In the end, people should pick computer hardware based on preference and functionality. If you are a software developer that loves gaming, picking a Windows laptop is a no-brainer since Macs aren’t for gaming. If you are a content creator that loves having a central ecosystem, you can go for the MacBooks with the M1 chips. Pick the hardware and OS that you need, rather than what the internet tells you.

Cheers!