Intel Alder Lake Mobility CPUs are faster than Apple M1 Max, and AMD 5980HX

The time has come to take a closer look at Intel’s new hardware, which is going to compete very closely with the Apple M1 Max processors, as well as AMD’s upcoming mobility chips.

And while scores for AMD’s next-generation mobility chips aren’t yet available, the ones for the current generation x86 Intel and Apple M1 Max chips are the ones we will focus on.

Intel Core i9 faster than M1 Max, 11980HK and AMD 5980HX

We already knew that Apple’s M1 Max is a great processor and that it was going to motivate engineers at AMD and Intel to push the ceiling and come even more impressive results.

It was pretty clear that the x86 architecture would never beat ARM on power efficiency, however absolute power, within roughly comparable battery life, is another matter altogether.

Geekbench results showed that Apple processors had the upper hand, due to the fact that these tests relied heavily on algorithmic optimizations.

We witnessed Apple’s M1 Max CPU rise above everything x86 in-sight, and even manage to outscore Intel’s flagship desktop chip, the Core i9 11900K.

Intel is now about to make a major comeback as it finally moves on to a sub 14nm node on its desktop side, beginning with Alder Lake, which is built on Intel 7.

However, the introduction of these extremely power-efficient e-cores will further improve performance on the mobility side, considering Alder Lake’s big.SMALL design was built for mobility.

Here is the score of Intel’s 12900HK Alder Lake Mobility flagship in Geekbench, as published by the people at wccftech.

As we can see, the Alder Lake’s powerful p-cores effortlessly overwhelm the single-threaded benchmark with a score of 1851.

Note that there are several overclocked and stock benchmarks for the Core i9 11980HK on Geekbench but only stock configurations have been used for these tests.

Looking closely at the results, we can see that Intel has improved the single-threaded performance by 14.5% generation over generation.

Even if we all foresaw Intel winning on the single-threaded front because of high clock rates and some serious architectural improvements, it’s still surprising they beat the Apple M1 Max on the multi-threaded front.

Alder Lake Core i9 12900HK mobility processors get an astounding score, which is closely followed by Apple.

This is a generation over generation increase of almost 45% in roughly the same TDP. Not at all surprising, considering that, even though the ADL-P CPU only has 8 big cores, the small cores have proven to be quite powerful as well.

Keep in mind that this benchmark test was done using Windows 11, which allows Intel’s brand new Thread Director technology to run.

What is your opinion on these test results? Share your thoughts with us in the comments section below.