Can Apple M1 chips beat Intel-powered devices?

As far as Intel is concerned, it’s the poor gaming experience of a Mac which makes Intel-powered devices much superior. This boast wasn’t in vain, Intel has thrown some research behind this. Macs run on Apple M1 chips, which is obviously inferior to what Intel used to make, but about half of the most popular games don’t even run on the platform.

Intel made the subsequent statement during Computex 2021, at the same time which also implies that the Intel-Apple relationship is somewhat over for all purposes.

“Our laptops provide a better gaming experience than 100% of Apple Mac laptops”

Apple M1 chips are far from close to the fastest CPU core in the world though it is the world’s most power-efficient core, which is quite remarkable. Apple M1 chips continues to be the go-to benchmark for mobility chips so it is no wonder that Intel has chosen to finally respond with some amusing marketing of their own.

It would seem that Intel has decided to burn whatever bonds remained with Apple and strike back just as strongly. They presented a number of benchmarks, most of which were run on Bootcamp and even some native games but the Intel/Windows-based systems easily beat the MacBook ones. That was mostly because of the fact that Apple uses only AMD-based GPUs and their best MacBook is currently limited to RX 5600M, which easily loses to an RTX 3060 that comes in Intel (or even AMD) based laptops.

This will be the start of a new era and even if Apple is victorious and ends up beating x86, there will be a big learning phase before gaming performance can significantly catch up to x86 optimizations.

Though the lack of response and ignoring the threat represented by the Apple M1 chips wasn’t looking good for Intel, but it seems that Intel is finally ready to start fighting back. I guess Intel doesn’t like things starting with an ‘A’ – AMD, Arm, and Apple, however, as the saying is “Everything is fair in love and war”.