Intel Creates Own Benchmarks to Beat Apple M1 Chips

Intel has taken quite a few blows in recent months, and Apple ditching Intel processors in favour of its own chips simply made matters worse for Team Blue.

The industry veteran is now trying to bring the fight to Apple, with new benchmarks showcasing the so-called superiority of its 11th-gen ‘Tiger Lake’ processors for notebooks over Apple’s M1 processor (via Tom’s Hardware).

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

The benchmarks, released by Intel in a package of slides, are based on the company’s own tests in an in-house environment, so take them with a grain of salt.

In productivity applications like Chrome and Microsoft Office, an Intel test-bench equipped with an 11th-gen Core i7-1185G7 and 16GB of RAM performed 30% faster than an M1-equipped MacBook Pro with 16GB of RAM.

The slides also tout Evo, Intel’s Project Athena upgrade and all the improvements it brings.

Intel and Apple were on fairly equal ground in gaming on integrated graphics, but since these are vendor-generated benchmarks from Intel, the company cheekily assigned the MacBook Pro results of 0 Frames Per Second in titles that the Apple M1 simply doesn’t support yet.

With the ability to add discrete graphics cards, however, PC will almost always take the cake against MacBooks when it comes to gaming.

Intel’s slides focus just as much on performance against the Apple M1 as they do on the versatility and widespread compatibility (both with software and hardware) that Intel’s processors facilitate.

Now, there’s a huge caveat with these tests, according to Tom’s Hardware:

Intel’s performance claims need to be taken with a certain grain of salt, as they’re in Intel-created tests and not industry-standard benchmarks. The fact that it switched out between the Pro and the Air for battery life (as well as the Core i7-1185G7 and Core i7-1165G7) also shows an incomplete picture.

Yeah, Intel isn’t going to fool anyone by cherry-picking results from its own benchmarks.

With Intel’s empire now under threat from Apple’s proprietary ARM-based processing solution and AMD, the tech giant is currently feeling the heat.

Intel has even appointed a new CEO to lead the company through these trying times, but for now it appears Apple Silicon still is impressive, and with even more powerful chips rumoured to come soon, it’ll be unclear how Intel will respond.