Did Intel Copy Apple M1 With Its Lunar Lake Processors?

LaptopMedia.com Comparisons Did Intel Copy Apple M1 With Its Lunar Lake Processors?

From: Simeon Nikolov 11 June 2024 / 22:15 | 0

Everyone wants to be like Apple. Or at least to have its profits. In the current AI tech race, Apple’s ARM-based architectures seem to have the lead when it comes to efficiency and AI performance. This is why Intel is pivoting hard in order to reach the combination of efficiency and performance that Apple is enjoying right now. If you take a look at its latest Lunar Lake chip and Apple’s M-series, you can see that the chip layout is very very similar.

Apple M-series layout

Intel Lunar Lake layout

Intel is integrating the memory inside the SoC,as well as removing hyper-threading and sticking to a 4+4 layout of 4 Performance cores and 4 Efficiency cores. You can learn more about the Lunar Lake family in our breakdown. Current Meteor Lake CPUs have a lot of cores (up to 16), including hyper-threaded P-cores.

Today we’re diving into the performance of Lunar Lake’s predecessor, by comparing the Intel Core Ultra 9 185H against the Apple M4. We’ve accumulated tons of tests of the two chips in productivity tasks, and today we’re giving you all the results. Besides the chart, below you’ll see that the M4 wins in all of them.

BTW, a Snapdragon X Elite chip is on its way to our laboratory so stay tuned for more interesting comparisons.

Source: @lafaiel

Test	M4	185H	Difference
File Compression	3310	2415	37.1%
Navigation	3353	2195	52.8%
HTML5 Browser	3707	2403	54.3%
PDF Renderer	3436	2490	38.0%
Photo Library	3528	2455	43.7%
Clang	4252	2325	82.9%
Text Processing	3371	2454	37.4%
Asset Compression	3247	2580	25.9%
Object Detection	5508	2499	120.4%
Background Blur	3741	3088	21.1%
Horizon Detection	3989	2970	34.3%
Object Remover	4445	2118	109.9%
HDR	4278	2446	74.9%
Photo Filter	4485	2369	89.3%
Ray Tracer	3001	2430	23.5%
Structure from Motion	3452	2702	27.8%
Freq	4409	5087	-13.3%
Score	3758	2473	51.9%
Score w/o SME (Object Det.)	3641	2467	47.6%
Est. PPC uplift	75.3%
Est. PPC uplift (w/o SME)	70.3%

The biggest difference is in the Object Detection, which is an AI-based task. Here Apple has a 120% lead, which is more than double. Intel and Apple are both trying to pivot to AI as hard as possible, designing their hardware with an AI-first approach, including powerful NPUs. Intel is still four years behind Apple when it comes to utilizing this design philosophy.

However, both are way behind NVIDIA, which has been making its GPUs with AI in mind since 2015 and is way ahead of competitors right now, which is reflected in its stock price, which surges with every earnings call.

All Intel Core Ultra 8 185H laptops:

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