The first benchmarks for the upcoming Alder Lake mobile processors have just leaked. A priori, these chips wouldn’t have too many worries to rub shoulders with the Apple M1 Max and AMD’s mobile-dedicated CPUs, especially the Core i9 12900HK.
The Core i9 12900HK ahead on laptops too?
While Apple will no doubt praise the qualities of its SoC on the x86 architecture, it will probably be difficult for the latter to beat an ARM chip in terms of energy efficiency. But when it comes to absolute power (with a roughly comparable battery life), we’re talking about something completely different. We know that Geekbench has always been a bench from which Apple has benefited (because it relies heavily on algorithmic optimizations). Recently, we could see the score of the Apple M1 Max SoC decimate absolutely all x86 tested. It even managed to beat Intel’s flagship desktop chip: the Intel Core i9 11900K.
The high-end mobile version of Alder Lake easily wins its monothread performance head-to-head with a score of 1851. For comparison, Apple’s 5nm-based M1 Max chip scores 1785 in monothread performance.
Watch out for the Geekbench / Apple pair…
But what is impressive is that this new CPU is ahead of the Apple M1 Max on the multithreaded benchmark. The Alder Lake Core i9 12900HK processor scores an amazing 13256, followed by Apple at 12753 points. The Intel 11980HK (stock) is further behind at 9149 points and the AMD at 8217 points.
The more skeptical will note that this set of tests was conducted using Windows 11, which allows Intel’s brand new Thread Director technology to run and perhaps, until recently, penalize AMD a bit. Finally, be careful in your personal analysis not to confuse CPU performance with GPU scores that have been leaking since the launch of the new Apple SoCs. Geekbench 5.4.1 tests : Apple M1 Max, Intel 11980HK, AMD R9 5980HX
