Apple M1 vs Intel Core i5-1038NG7

In the press, Apple's new M1 processor is covered with praise. A direct comparison of the Apple M1 with the Intel Core i5-1038NG7 shows that the praise is well justified.

Because Intel's 28 watt CPU is sometimes clearly beaten in comparison with the Apple M1 processor, which operates at a maximum of 15 watts. The most objective is currently the Cinebench R23, in which the Apple M1 is approx. 25% faster in the single core and 35% faster in the multi-core benchmark.

The raw performance per clock in the Apple M1 is enormously better than in the Intel Core i5-1038NG7, because the latter clocks its cores with up to 3.8 GHz, while the M1 is clocked with a maximum of 3.2 GHz. The chips couldn't be more different in detail: Apple already relies on the big.LITTLE principle, in which small and efficient CPU cores are paired with fast performance cores, all 4 cores in the Intel processor are identical.

The Apple M1 can be used passively cooled (Apple Macbook Air 2020) or actively cooled (Apple Macbook Pro 2020 or Apple mac mini 2020). Active cooling has advantages in long load phases, during which the passively cooled Apple M1 throttles down to 10 watts of power loss after a certain period of time.

Apple has given the M1 16 special cores that can be used to calculate machine learning. In addition, the new AV1 video codec is decoded in hardware, which can benefit the energy consumption and thus also the battery life in a notebook. The iGPU (internal graphics unit) of the Apple M1 beats the Intel Iris Plus Graphics (Ice Lake G7) by a factor of 2.5 in FP32 calculations (single precision).

This is impressive, but is also due to the fact that the iGPU of the Intel Core i5-1038NG7 is still manufactured in a 14 nm process (the processor itself is already manufactured in 10 nm), while the Apple M1 is manufactured entirely in 5 nm at TSMC . Apple also connects the LPDDR4X-4266 memory tightly and efficiently to the SoC, which significantly increases the bandwidth compared to the classic use in DRAM modules.