100 watts, so basically I have no reason to use this over a desktop. The battery life on the m1 macbooks is a game changer. I don't need more power out of my laptop I need it to be cool to the touch and last at least 9 hours with normal usage.
With those laptops, we're back to the days of the luggables. It's a desktop you can carry, with some caveats in terms of performance related to the choice of parts.
Apple in-housing their chip design was a brilliant move. The A-series processors were a good indication what was coming up, but still the M1 blew me away.
Still waiting to see what they'll do with Mac Pro + M-series. Do they go for a M2 or just slap a dozen M1s in parallel =)
With RTX 3080 Ti though. So yeah - I don't think it can match Apple M1 efficiency but reviews of P-series and U-series Alder Lake mobile CPUs are going to be interesting and what I am looking forward to.
> During the Cinebench R23 multi-core test, the Alder Lake laptop was consistently in the 100-watt range, with spikes between 130 and 140 watts. We haven’t tested the power draw of the M1 Pro/Max ourselves, but AnandTech did using Cinebench R23 and found that the M1 Max’s power draw was 39.7 watts versus over 100 for the 11th-gen MSI GE76 Raider.
Cinebench is a pure CPU test though, so I feel the comparison is more or less apples-to-apples.
I was talking about video playback tests. Unless they disabled discrete GPUs during the test,a laptop using 3080Ti for video playback is not going to be efficient.
2 watts total? I doubt it. The display is a major drain. I went down this rabbit hole years ago and on a 2012-vintage X220 with an i7 I could get it down to just under 6W with the display on minimum brightness, the wifi and Bluetooth off, and a host of configuration options including but not limited to what's available through Powertop and TLP.
I'm sure it's better than 5W and change nowadays but the display is by far the biggest draw and I don't think you'll get down to 2W.
Ah yeah, maybe GPU only. Don't the MacBooks with the onboard discrete GPU have an integrated Intel GPU as well? I'd assume those ones physically power off the big daddy card when it's not needed.
They used to. That’s how they worked but it ended up more trouble than it’s worth. I think they stopped trying to switch it on/off during the Intel era (not sure) but there are no discrete GPUs in the M1 era so far.
Yeah a well lit display can be a huge drain, but of course I can control that. I would hope WiFi/BT don’t use much relative to CPU/display, but I can’t claim to know.
It would’ve been nice if they specified but it was probably using the Intel iGPU for video playback. Those results would line up with last year’s laptops in integrated mode. Even with comparable hardware the MacBook is literally 3x as efficient.
In my experience if the dGPU is on at all it won’t get 6 hours of anything.
It’s an attempt to show top of the line CPU performance. To get that you need a very power hungry setup on the Intel side and they only win by single digit percentages.
Intel’s lower power chips may be able to match/beat the M1 range’s power draw, but one would assume they can’t keep up that level of performance while doing it.
Apple seems to have the best of both worlds at the moment. It can perform very well or go really low peer with a single chip.
It honestly depends on the benchmarks you're using. Dave2D posted multicore Cinebench scores[0] the other day that compared M1 Max to this same laptop, and it was really a blowout.
Apple's foiree into ARM has been going better than it could have gone, but recommending an ARM chip still comes with several asterisks, which make it kinda hard to recommend for people who don't make a living out of reading/writing words on a screen and highly specific creative work that may-or-may-not benefit from the architecture of the chip. Regardless, they've got their work cut out for them, and it should be interesting to see how Apple responds.
> Double ouch. That's a huge gap [6 vs. 17 hours of "offline video playback"], and 6 is low even in absolute terms.
That test is measuring backlight consumption, not SOC efficiency. It's a huge display tuned for gaming vs. Apple's famous system power optimization on a panel about half the size. All CPUs on both systems are effectively at idle here, it says nothing beyond the fact that MSI isn't going to (or capable of, frankly) spend their time optimizing idle power draw on a gaming rig.
Ouch.
> MSI GE76 Raider got 6 hours of offline video playback, a far cry from the MacBook Pro’s 17 hours.
Double ouch. That's a huge gap, and 6 is low even in absolute terms.
It's still a nice beefy chip, but still a far cry from the engineering marvel that Apple pulled off with the M1