Intel’s Latest Core i9 Beats Apple’s M1 Max In Benchmarks

One of the main reasons Apple decided to stop using Intel processors and switch to their own custom chipsets is because the company did not want to be at the mercy of Intel’s development schedule, especially since over the years Intel has faced numerous delays which in turn affected Apple’s ability to refresh its computers.

With the M1 series of chipsets, we’ve seen some benchmarks of how it has actually performed Intel’s processors and beaten them by quite a huge margin, but it looks like Intel is fighting back. According to recent Geekbench 5 benchmarks, it appears that the company’s latest Core i9 processor has actually outperformed Apple’s M1 Max chipset.

The Core i9-12900HK processor managed to score a multi-core score of 12,707 while the M1 Max managed 12,244, making it 4% faster. However, benchmark scores only tell one side of the story. According to PCWorld, their tests found that when running the Cinebench R23 benchmark, Intel’s processor was constantly in the 100-watts range and even spiked to 140-watts at one point in time.

This is compared to Apple’s M1 Max where AnandTech found that using the same benchmarks, it drew around 40 watts, at least half of what Intel’s processor draws. This means that while Intel’s processors are marginally faster, their power draw is considerably more than Apple which in turn can affect battery life and if used in a desktop PC, could also result in your electricity bills being higher.

This isn’t to say Intel’s processor is bad, there are obviously pros and cons and different usage scenarios, but it might be something to think about.

Tyler Lee
Categories: Apple, Computers
Tags: apple silicon, Intel, Social Hit