Benchmarks confirm Intel’s latest Core i9 chip outperforms Apple’s M1 Max with several caveats

Joe Rossignol, MacRumors:

Benchmark results have started to surface for MSI’s new GE76 Raider, one of the first laptops to be powered by Intel’s new 12th-generation Core i9 processor.

And:

Geekbench 5 results show that the GE76 Raider with the Core i9-12900HK processor has an average multi-core score of 12,707, while the 16-inch MacBook Pro with the M1 Max chip has an average multi-core score of 12,244. This means the Core i9 processor is around 4% faster than the M1 Max chip in this particular comparison.

I assume the battery life is 4% worse, yeah?

The new GE76 Raider’s power draw from the wall while running a CPU-only Cinebench R23 benchmark and found the Core i9 was consistently in the 100-watts range, and even briefly spiked to 140 watts. By comparison, when running the same Cinebench R23 benchmark on the 16-inch MacBook Pro, AnandTech found the M1 Max chip’s power draw from the wall to be around 40 watts.

Wait. What? The Intel chip ranged from 100-140 watts, and the M1 Max was level at 40 watts? That sounds like it might impact battery life more than 4%.

The new GE76 Raider achieved nearly 6 hours of offline video playback. Apple advertises the latest 16-inch MacBook Pro as getting up to 21 hours of battery life for offline video playback.

And there it is. Could see that coming from a mile away.

And there’s size, too:

Design is also a factor, with the GE76 Raider being a 17-inch gaming laptop that is just over an inch thick and weighs nearly 6.5 pounds. By comparison, the new 16-inch MacBook Pro is 0.66 inches thick and weighs 4.8 pounds.

Huge tradeoff for a tiny speed gain. And I’d expect that speed gain to disappear with the next rev of Apple Silicon.