M1 Versus I-7
The battle between Intel and Apple has entered a new chapter. Formerly united in their goals to ship Intel-powered MacBooks, these two companies have gone their separate ways. Apple is using their ARM processors called M1 chips which will kicked out Intel from the MacBook space. Intel is also facing fierce competition with AMD in the Chromebook and Windows laptop market. Intel is attacking back at Apple with a marketing campaign that explains to customers why Intel-powered laptops are better than Macs. So far, those efforts largely revolve around the flexibility afforded by Windows 10 PCs more than direct performance and battery life comparisons. The war between these two manufacturers raises questions about the differences between Intel-based and M1-equipped laptops, and which is best.
The most important considerations for a processor for many customers is performance. For the longest time, Intel was unrivaled when it came to mobile-chip performance with its Core processors running around the competition. That changed at the start of 2020 when AMD released its Ryzen 4000-series chips, which outperformed Intel's dual 10th Gen ( Ice Lake and Comet Lake ) offerings in many of our tests while delivering excellent efficiency.
Apple delivered another blow to Intel with its M1 processors. The Apple Silicon powering the latest MacBook Pro and MacBook Air put up very fast results in benchmark tests. The M1 chip has only gotten faster as developers optimized their software to run natively on ARM. According to Geekbench 5, the new MacBook Pro M1 is 70% faster in single-core and 50% faster in multiple-core, but numbers in the paper do not always translate to real-life performance since the M1 has only eight threads while the i7 has 12 threads.
Benchmarks aren't everything, and Intel offered more than just scores. The company also touted qualitative differences between Apple's MacBooks and x86-based laptops. Only three or four of Intel's 21-slide presentation covered actual benchmarks. Most of the rest was devoted to points about choice. Intel's main point was that there are a lot of PC makers in the world, but only one Apple. PCs have more peripherals, PCs have more games, and PCs cover a broader price spectrum.
In the end, there is no reason, price excluded, to avoid the new M1 MacBook models. They have premium designs, good displays, fast performance and long battery life. If you don't care too much for style or don't care about which OS you're using, there are plenty of reasons to choose an Intel-powered Windows 10 machine instead.