Can Intel finally beat ARM on performance per Watt?

Rather than the Hackaday article, which doesn't add anything to the original, here's Jeff's actual video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A2B7oI0FYqo

and post:

https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2026/excited-for-intel-eff...

  > no headphone jack

The improved efficiency is great!

The Apple Neo was still 2x faster for graphics and around 1.4x faster for single core cpu. And remember the Apple Neo is running an iPhone CPU that is much slower than the M series.

It is strange that this chip is so crazy efficient though. I would love to know the details of exactly why it is? It seems like some new tech or process?

I do want 1.5x battery life for free out of my next laptop. Who wouldn’t?

A more accurate title is can Intel (Linux/Windows) beat Apple?

If you don't want to run Windows, is there even a choice? My issue now with the non-Apple computers if you want to run Linux it's really hard to predict how awful Chromium/Firefox will be. My work Dell Laptop is only a 3 year old CPU with integrated GPU (and unused Nvidia GPU) but Chromium and Firefox are both slow as shit just loading pages like Slack and Outlook. Even resizing the browser windows seems 4-5x times slower than my M3 Macbook Air.

Maybe this is strictly a Linux issue but it hardly matters when the Windows ecosystem is pretty stagnant, full of junk-ware, and software development is much, much better on Linux/MacOS.

Whoever used the most recent TSMC node will have the best specs.

My guess is that even the designs of the transistors and perhaps logic gates are IP blocks owned by TSMC and not whoever wants to get their chip fabricated.

Intel wins, in HPL FP64. Its a stretch to take a single metric and apply it's outcome broadly to the chip's general functionality. Especially when by large the A18 chip with half the power requirement beats it in almost every other benchmark.

It's long been possible (since Alder Lake at the latest) to tune Intel CPUs for task energy consumption competitive with Apple Silicon, but bone-headed OEMs including Apple always tuned them the other way, wasting a lot of power for tiny performance gains. It is inappropriate to say that you evaluated the perf per watt on a Core Ultra 7 265K because what you really evaluated was how HP, Lenovo, or Dell configured that chip. But for years it has been the case that with one of the Atom variants (Gracemont, Skymont, ___mont) tuned to non-ridiculous scaling modes (capped at 2GHz, say) the energy story is quite good. The Apple platform does not have eager scaling and this is part of their efficiency story.

This is interesting but what I would love to see is Mac M4/M5 performance (speed) on an Intel laptop CPU. I know that it will be really difficult to pull off (assuming it's achievable at all) given that Intel just makes the CPU and the computer manufacturers for PCs don't do the kind of tuning that Apple is able to do, but still, I can't help but hope that maybe it can be done somehow. Maybe even while making the machines still serviceable! (Yes yes, I know, but a man can dream...)

Well, they beat even TSMC on performance so they’re at least halfway there.

Why people are excited about Intel barely matching already outdated CPUs of the competition?

Shouldn't we be concerned that the company instead of aiming for the leap is producing legacy hardware destined for landfill?

Wake me up when Intel produces something groundbreaking.

If you normalise for both process node and clock speed, AMD and Apple are tied on single threaded perf/watt, and AMD Zen 5c cores have about a 12% perf/area advantage.

No headphone jack! Why Dell?

The processor is a Intel Core 5 320 Wildcat lake, with 4 "low power efficient cores" and 2 non-hyperthreaded Performance-cores.

It's variant of Panther Lake which has some models with Arc GPUs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panther_Lake_(microprocessor)

https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/sku/246018/...