Intel’s Alder Lake processor is starting to become available in PC laptops and that means one thing: benchmarks! Macworld’s sister publication, PCWorld, posted a review of one of the first laptops with the the Core i9-12900HK processor (code named Alder Lake), and it inevitably got us thinking about Apple’s M1 Pro and Max.
To be clear, PCWorld didn’t include Apple silicon in its review—they are reviewing Windows-based laptops and comparing Alder Lake to its predecessor and a new 8-core Ryzen 9 5900HX CPU. Many of the benchmark programs PCWorld used aren’t even available on the Mac or do not have native M1 versions, but PCWorld did run Geekbench and Cinebench, two benchmarks Macworld also uses. And we learned a lot from them.
First, let’s check out the specifications for the laptops:
- 14-inch MacBook Pro M1 Pro: 10-core M1 Pro (8 performance and 2 efficiency); 16-core GPU; 32GB of DDR5/6400 RAM; 1TB SSD; Liquid Retina XDR display with ProMotion (120Hz max refresh rate)
- 14-inch MacBook Pro M1 Max: 10-core M1 Max (8 performance and 2 efficiency); 32-core GPU; 64GB of DDR5/6400 RAM; 4TB SSD; Liquid Retina XDR display with ProMotion (120Hz max refresh rate)
- MSI GE76 Raider: 12th-gen Intel 14-core Core i9-12900HK (6 performance cores and 8 efficiency cores); Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 Ti Laptop GPU; 32GB of DDR5/4800 RAM; 2TB NVMe PCIe 4.0 SSDs; 1080p display with a 360Hz refresh rate
Geekbench is a general, overall usage benchmark that we use to test all of Apple’s chips in Macs and iPhones. In Geekbench 5’s multi-core CPU test, the Alder Lake Core i9 has a 5 percent lead o
