Pre-release Intel Alder Lake processor outperforms Apple's M1 Max

Intel's Alder Lake processors, built on the 7nm process, aim for both performance and efficiency with a new hybrid architecture to take on Arm designs.

This month Apple released its new MacBooks with pro series of its M1 chip called the M1 Pro and the M1 Max. These powerful ARM-based chipsets outperformed other PCs based on x86 architecture, both in performance and power efficiency. But, Intel may soon reclaim its supreme position, as new benchmarks of its upcoming Alder Lake CPUs suggest. As per the new Geekbench scores of Intel's 12th-generation Alder Lake mobile processors, it narrowly outperformed Apple's flagship 10-core M1 Max, which also integrates a 32-core GPU and 64GB of unified memory.

The benchmarks show that the Core i9-12900HK has 14 cores and 20 threads, have six performance and hyper-threaded cores, and eight energy-efficient ones. The flagship processor has a 2.9 GHz base clock with a 371MHz boost clock. Intel's Alder Lake processors, built on the 7nm process, aim for both performance and efficiency with a new hybrid architecture to take on Arm designs. Intel has worked with Microsoft to optimize its new scheduler, dubbed Thread Director, on the latest Windows 11.

With this new i9-12900HK chipset, Intel has outperformed the M1 Max on both single-core and multi-core benchmarks, although by a slim margin, but it is crucial for Intel, as it had been losing its legacy, and also Apple ditched its CPUs for its own designs in the new MacBooks. The Alder lake CPUs are expected to hit the market by the end of this year or by early next year.