Apple M2 vs Intel Core i7-1355U

Apple M2

The Apple M2 is a System on a Chip (SoC) from Apple that is found in the late 2022 MacBook Air and, MacBook Pro 13. 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 16 MB shared L2 cache (up from 12 MB). 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  up to 2,4 GHz, the performance cores (P cluster) with up to 3,5 GHz and therefore higher than the M1 cores. The architecture should be similar to the A15 (iPhone 13) with Avalanche and Blizzard cores.

The chip features a unified memory architecture for the CPU and GPU cores and supports up to 24 GB LPDDR5-6400 for a bandwidth of up to 100GB/s.

According to Apple, the M2 offers a 18% higher CPU performance at the same power consumption level compared to the Apple M1. In our tests, the MacBook Pro 13 with active cooling was able to reach the 18% in Geekbench Multi. In other benchmarks we measured 12 to 15% gains compared to the M1. Therefore, the performance is now near the M1 Pro with 8 cores. The passively cooled MacBook Air may however suffer from throttling in longer load scenarios.

The integrated graphics card in the M2 offers 8 or 10 cores and a peak performance of 3.6 TFLOPs.

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

The Apple M2 includes 20 billion transistors (up from the 16 billion of the M1) and is manufactured in the second generation 5nm process at TSMC (most likely N5P). The power consumption is rated at 20W what we also measured under CPU load.

Intel Core i7-1355U

The Intel Core i7-1355U is a high-end mobile CPU for thin and light laptops based on the Alder Lake architecture (Raptor Lake-U / RPL-U series). It was announced in early 2023 and offers 2  performance cores (P-cores, Golden Cove architecture) and 8 efficient cores (E-cores, Gracemont architecture). The P-cores support Hyper-Threading leading to 12 supported threads when combined with the E-cores. The clock rate ranges from 1.7 to 5 GHz on the performance cluster and 1.2 to 3.7 GHz on the efficient cluster. The performance of the E-cores should be similar to old Skylake cores (compare to the Core i7-6700HQ). All cores can use up to 12 MB L3 cache. The CPU supports "Essentials" vPro management features. Compared to the P-series (28W) or H-series (45W), the 15W TDP may limit the sustained performance.

Performance

Thanks to the high clock speed, the Core i7-1355U should perform slightly better than the older core i7-1265U (up to 4.8 GHz). The faster i7 like the i7-1365U models offer only higher clock rates (and a faster iGPU).

Architecture

The integrated memory controller supports various memory types up to LPDDR5-6400. The Thread Director (in hardware) can support the operating system to decide which thread to use on the performance or efficient cores for the best performance. For AI tasks, the CPU also integrates GNA 3.0 and DL Boost (via AVX2). Quick Sync in version 8 is the same as in the Rocket Lake CPUs and supports MPEG-2, AVC, VC-1 decode, JPEG, VP8 decode, VP9, HEVC, and AV1 decode in hardware. The CPU still only supports PCIe 4.0 x8 for a GPU and two PCIe 4.0 x4 for SSDs.

The integrated graphics card is based on the Xe-architecture and offers all 96 EUs (Execution Units) operating at up to 1.3 GHz.

Power consumption

This Core i7 CPU is rated at a TDP of 15W (base power, PL1) and a maximum turbo power of 55W (PL2). The RPL-U processors are built in a further improved Intel 7 process (10nm SuperFin) that allows higher clock rates.