Apple M1 vs Intel i7: Cherry-picked benchmarks and shifting Tiger Lake SKUs leave Intel looking revolutionary rather than evolutionary

A series of slides from Intel has attempted to show how Tiger Lake can outperform the Apple M1 and how an Intel Evo laptop is likely a better choice for many over an M1-based MacBook Pro or Air. It’s understandable that Intel perceives Apple as a threat on multiple levels, with the latter ditching Intel chips while in the process of becoming self-sufficient in this space by 2022 and Team Blue’s new CEO, Pat Gelsinger, already dismissing the rival as a “lifestyle company in Cupertino”. But the production of these slides certainly indicates that Intel is rattled by Apple’s direction, so the former wants to show that its Tiger Lake chips can keep the latter’s M1 chip down through a series of clearly cherry-picked benchmarks.

Starting with “productivity performance”, Intel demonstrates that the i7-1185G7 working alongside 16 GB RAM can hammer the M1 inside an Apple MacBook Pro with 16 GB memory in multiple applications. So we can see almost three times greater relative performance for the Intel chip in photo enhancement (WebXPRT 3 – Chrome) and 2.3x faster speeds when exporting PowerPoint to PDF. As PC World points out, it’s advantageous for Intel to utilize WebXPRT 3 for these particular tests, but these are common tasks users might find themselves facing on a daily basis – so it’s understandable why Intel would highlight these specific applications.