Apple M1 vs Intel Core i7-1280P

Apple M1

The Apple M1 is a System on a Chip (SoC) from Apple that is found in the late 2020 MacBook Air, MacBook Pro 13, and Mac Mini. It offers 8 cores divided in four performance cores and four power-efficiency cores. The big cores offer 192 KB instruction cache, 128 KB data cache, and 12 MB shared L2 cache. According to Apple the performance of these cores should be better than anything on the market (in late 2020). The four efficiency cores are a lot smaller and offer only 128 KB instruction cache, 64 KB data cache, and 4 MB shared cache. The efficiency cores (E cluster) clock with 600 - 2064 MHz, the performance cores (P cluster) with 600 - 3204 MHz.

The M1 is available in two TDP variants, a passive cooled 10 Watt variant for the MacBook Air and an active cooled faster variant for the MacBook Pro 13 and Mac Mini. Those should offer a better-sustained performance according to Apple.

The integrated graphics card in the M1 offers 8 cores (7 cores in the entry MacBook Air) and a peak performance of 2.6 teraflops. Apple claims that it is faster than any other iGPU at the time of announcement.

Furthermore, the SoC integrates a fast 16 core neural engine with a peak performance of 11 TOPS (for AI hardware acceleration), a secure enclave (e.g., for encryption), a unified memory architecture, Thunderbolt / USB 4 controller, an ISP, and media de- and encoders.

The Apple M1 includes 16 billion transistors (up from the 10 billion of the A12Z Bionic and therefore double the amount of a Tiger Lake-U chip like the i7-1185G7) and is manufactured in 5nm at TSMC.

Intel Core i7-1280P

The Intel Core i7-1280P is the flagship Alder Lake-P CPU, which is to say, an expensive 28 W part meant for use in ultra-light (yet actively cooled) laptops. This CPU was announced in early 2022 and it has 6 performance cores (P-cores, Golden Cove architecture) mated to 8 efficient cores (E-cores, Gracemont architecture). The P-cores are Hyper-Threading-enabled for whopping 20 threads when combined with the E-cores. The clock speeds range from 1.8 GHz to 4.8 GHz for the performance cluster and 1.3 GHz to 3.6 GHz for the efficiency cluster. This is the only hexa-core 28 W Alder Lake CPU as of February 2022, trumping what the more affordable i7-1270P and i7-1260P have in store. Full vPro feature set is supported by this Core i7 ("Enterprise" tier, allowing for remote device management).

Architecture

The i7 is a continuation of Intel's efforts to use the ARM-developed big.LITTLE technology for its own benefit. A single "little" Alder Lake core is supposed to be just as fast as a Skylake core (as found in the venerable Core i7-6700HQ among other options) which is six years old at this point. All of a Core i7-1280P's CPU cores enjoy access to 24 MB of L3 cache. The integrated memory controller supports up to 64 GB of LPDDR5-5200, DDR5-4800, LPDDR4x-4267 or DDR4-3200 RAM. Just like the other 12th Gen Intel Core processors, Core i7-1280P comes with Thread Director which is a new functionality designed to help Windows 11 decide which cores to use for what workload for best performance and efficiency possible. Hardware acceleration of AI algorithms is supported via GNA 3.0 and DL Boost (via AVX2). PCI-Express 5.0 support has not found its way into Alder Lake P processors, so users will have to be content with PCI-Express 4.0 for the time being. Four PCI-Express 4 lanes allow for a read/write rate of up to 7.9 GB/s, provided a suitably fast NVMe SSD is used.

Please note this is not a user-replaceable CPU. It gets soldered permanently on to the motherboard (BGA1744 socket interface).

Performance

The average 1280P in our database delivers multi-thread benchmarks scores that are most similar to those of the Ryzen 9 5900HS, Ryzen 9 PRO 6950HS and also the Core i9-11980HK.

Thanks to its decent cooling solution and a long-term CPU power limit of 80 W, the MSI Summit E16 Flip A12UDT-031 is among the fastest laptops built around the 1280P that we know of. It can be roughly 60% faster in CPU-bound workloads than the slowest system featuring the same chip in our database, as of August 2023.

Graphics

The built-in graphics adapter in the form of the 96 EU Iris Xe running at up to 1.45 GHz has seen no change from what was built into the 11th Gen Tiger Lake-UP3 processors, like a i7-1165G7, which is hardly a downside as this iGPU is loaded with modern features such as AV1 video decoding capability and SUHD 4320p monitor support. An Iris Xe Graphics G7 will let you use up to 4 monitors simultaneously, provided the laptop has the ports required.

The graphics adapter will let you play most games at 1080p / Medium settings to be very close to NVIDIA's MX350.

That being said, the Xe's gaming performance is bound to be tied to how high the Power Limits and how competent the cooling solution of a laptop are. Fast RAM is a prerequisite for decent performance as well (the Iris Xe has to make do with no dedicated video memory).

Last but not the least, we discovered that the GPU utilization when playing YouTube UHD 2160p60 videos is higher than it was with Tiger Lake chips.

Power consumption

The i7's base power consumption (also known as the default TDP value or the PL1) is 28 W, with 64 W being its maximum Intel-recommended Turbo power consumption (also known as the PL2). The "Minimum Assured" power consumption is fairly high at 20 watts. All in all, an active cooling solution is a must for a CPU like this.

The i7-1280P is built with Intel's fourth-gen 10 nm process marketed as Intel 7 for decent, as of late 2022, energy efficiency. This is still a rather power-hungry CPU; a single P-core will happily eat more than 20 W and even ask for more when under heavy load. A couple of higher-end 7 nm U-class AMD Ryzen 5000 chips are noticeably more modest than the i7 while delivering the same or higher performance levels.