Apple, the Cupertino based tech company, dumped Intel in 2020 in favour of its own M1 chip, which is based on the company’s A14 Bionic chipset, that makes use of 5nm processing technology. This came as a huge blow to the company since a lot of their revenue came from Apple and its Mac series of PCs and Laptops. That being said, it seems Intel was ready with its answer to the M1 chip, since, the chipmaker recently shared benchmarks, which, as per PC World is an attempt to showcase that Intel’s 11th Gen Core processors are better than Apple’s M1 chip.
What Do the Benchmarks Show?
The report describes these benchmarks as ‘carefully crafted’ due to several reasons. According to Intel, exporting a PowerPoint presentation in the PDF format is 2.3x faster on a Windows laptop running the 11th-Gen Core i7 processor and 16GB RAM compared to the process that takes more time in a 13-inch MacBook Pro with Apple M1 chip and 16GB of RAM. Intel also states that the Mac is not ideal for gaming, due to the lack of support for some major games such as Gear Tactics and Hitman 2. Additionally, the company states that Topaz Lab’s AI-based photo enlargement software gigapixel AI performs 6 times faster with the Core i7 processor as compared to M1 MacBook Pro.
As per PC World, this result is understandable since the apps are designed to take advantage of the hardware acceleration present in Intel processors. Gaming was however not as clear as the regular AI test. When it comes to the battery side of things, both the M1 MacBook Air and the Acer Swift 5 running on the Intel i7 Processor (11th Gen) achieved a similar 10-hour battery life when streaming Netflix with a few additional tabs. Do note, both laptops were at 250 nits of display brightness, with MacBook Air running Safari and the Acer running Chrome. It is also worth mentioning that Apple is rumoured to be launching two new laptops, which are the 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pro models, with a new Apple Silicon chip later this year, which might just beat out Intel again.
