Apple M1 Max vs Intel Alder Lake Core i9 - Who Wins?

Benchmarks are out for Intel’s Alder Lake Core i9 chip. The raw numbers look like a win for PC users, even when compared with Apple’s M1 Max. However, as Macworld pointed out, there is a bit more to consider when making comparisons.

Geekbench 5’s OpenCL graphics benchmark results look dramatic. The PC laptops PCWorld tested have expensive discrete GPUs that offer peak performance, and it shows in the results. But a more applicable comparison is to examine the results for the integrated GPUs. In this case, the M1 Max and its 32-core GPU posts a 183 percent increase over the Alder Lake’s integrated GPU, an Iris Xe.

Qualcomm Sets Out Apple Silicon Competitor

Qualcomm is preparing for battle with Cupertino and its M-series chips. It laid out its competition to Apple Silicon for Windows device, which will launch in 2023, The Verge reported. Perhaps most interesting of all is the fact that those working on this project used to work for Apple.

Dr. James Thompson, Qualcomm’s chief technology officer, announced the plans for the new chips at the company’s 2021 investor day event, with the goal of getting samples to hardware customers in about nine months ahead of product launches with the new chip in 2023. The new chip will be designed by the Nuvia team, which Qualcomm had bought earlier this year in a massive $1.4 billion acquisition. Nuvia, notably, was founded in 2019 by a trio of former Apple employees who had previously worked on the company’s A-series chips.

Buying a New Mac? Consider Using the M1 Chip Decision Tree

If you’re planning to buy a new MacBook Pro, this decision tree for the M1 Pro | Max models may be able to help. It shows you every possible configuration with the CPU, GPU, RAM, Power Adapter, and SSD. “And when I say 18 configurations, I’m not even counting the choices on SSD size. All 18 configurations come in 512GB, 1TB, 2TB, 4GB and 8TB. And yes, I verified that you can configure the bottom-of-the-line M1 Pro with an 8TB drive and you can configure the top-of-the-line M1 Max with only 512GB. That means there are actually 90 different ways you can configure the new Apple Silicon MacBook Pros. Unless you layer in the option of color with grey vs. another grey, which makes the grand total 180 different configurations.”

How Well Do the M1 Pro and M1 Pro Max Chips Handle Games?

Apple said that its latest chips, the M1 Pro | Pro Max are great for content creators like developers and photographers. What about gamers?

All games were run at a full-HD-equivalent resolution (1,920 by 1,200 pixels) because the two new MacBook Pros have differing native display resolutions. (Testing at each laptop’s native resolution would have rendered the scores non-comparable.)