What Apple’s own CPUs mean for you

If you take its marketing at face value, Apple’s new M1 processors inside the new MacBook Pro and Air are the best in the world... But are they really – after you unpack the caveats?

When Apple announced that it would drop Intel chips from its range in lieu of in-house designed processors back in June, it created a lot of curiosity around just how successful that first round of silicon would be. In November, when it announced the first Apple M1 SoCs built for PCs, Apple basically said that its first in-house PC processors in 15 years are better than anything else on the market. “The world’s fastest CPU core in low-powered silicon, the world’s best CPU performance per watt, the world’s fastest integrated graphics in a personal computer”, were just some of the lofty claims made by Apple about its M1 chips at launch.

Since we don’t have a new 13-inch MacBook Pro at the time of writing, you’ll have to wait until next issue to know how well these claims hold up, but there’s a couple of important caveats that are worth pointing out which temper them considerably. The footnote to these claims in Apple’s press release doesn’t give away a whole lot about the tests Apple used as a foundation for these claims, but it does demarcate that the M1 chip was compared in October 2020 “against the highest-performing integrated GPUs for notebooks and desktops commercially available at the time of testing.” We have a Dell XPS 13 review in this issue (page 33) which uses one of Intel’s 11th generation laptop CPUs, and since this laptop was released in the US and Canada on the 1st of October (with local availability arriving in the middle of that month) we can reasonably assume that Apple actually included the new XPS and its Core i7-1165G7 in the somewhat vague comparison.

From a CPU perspective, including this processor as a comparison isn’t that big of a deal, since it wasn’t even the fastest that Intel had in laptops at the time. Even if it was, Apple was only testing for single-core performance (which doesn’t necessarily reflect overall processor power) and who knows what Apple means by “the fastest CPU core in low-powered silicon” since low-powered silicon isn’t a quantifiable norm.

What we are intrigued by, however, is the claim that it has the world’s fastest integrated graphics when compared to the Intel Iris Xe Graphics that we’ve just tested with the latest XPS 13. If you jump over to that review you’ll see that Intel has put a lot of effort into bolstering its integrated graphics capabilities. So much so, in fact, that the XPS 13 is actually capable of light 1080p gaming on modern titles if you dial down the graphical presets as far as they go.

The Intel Iris Xe Graphics on the new XPS 13 perform roughly twice as well as the Intel Iris Plus GPUs on previous generations, and since Apple has stated that its GPUs offer up to up to two times the graphical performance of the latest integrated GPUs, it would make sense that it was only compared to Intel’s older Iris Plus processors. But this is in stark contrast to what Apple states in its marketing material.

So basically Apple has either beaten Nvidia, AMD and Intel to make the world’s most efficient and best-value mid-range gaming GPU, or it’s made some pretty public marketing blunders in claims like “At every power level, M1 delivers significantly higher graphics performance than the very latest PC laptop chip – for up to 2x the graphics speed.”

Check back in next month to see which one it was...

“From a CPU perspective, including this processor as a comparison isn’t that big of a deal, since it wasn’t even the fastest that Intel had in laptops at the time.”