Pity nothing like that will ever happen.
This observation definitely isn’t going to win me many friends round these parts. But if Intel or AMD launched a chip with the kinds of capabilities just announced for Apple’s brand new M4 Pro, with the kind of IPC that Apple silicon delivers, with a GPU and memory bus of similar specs, we’d all lose our tiny minds. And that’s why I wish I could buy a PC laptop or gaming handheld with Apple silicon.
Because the new M4 Pro operates on a completely different level. Just to head you off at the rhetorical pass, let’s ignore for the moment the myriad caveats which come with this kind of thought experiment, the lack of Windows OS support, question marks over real-world gaming performance on an Apple-designed GPU, difficulties comparing things like ray-tracing performance and all that.
Instead, let’s focus on the hardware. For starters, Apple has access to TSMC’s very latest N3E production node, otherwise known as the most advanced silicon known to man. AMD uses N4, which is two generations old, while Intel has gone for last-gen N3B for its new Lunar Lake chip.
That’s the first clear advantage to Apple, because N3E is proving much more power efficient than N3B and both more efficient and much more dense than N4, the latter being derived from TSMC’s N5 node.
Then there’s Apple’s CPU architecture. In Cinebench 2024’s single-thread test, Apple’s latest CPU cores in the M4 generation can clock up around 175 points running at 4.4GHz. That compares to 141 points for Intel’s brand new Arrow Lake CPU at 5.7GHz and 139 points for the AMD Ryzen 9 9950X, which also has a maximum boost clock of 5.7GHz.
If you normalise those figures for clockspeed, you’ll find the Apple chip has 60% better IPC than the Intel or AMD CPUs. 60 bleedin‘ percent! If Intel launched a new CPU tomorrow with 60% better IPC, we simply wouldn’t believe it.
