Apple M2 vs. AMD Rembrandt vs. Intel Alder Lake Linux Benchmarks

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Apple M2 vs. AMD Rembrandt vs. Intel Alder Lake Linux Benchmarks

Given the significant interest from Phoronix readers about how well Apple M2 performs on Linux, especially after it was noted Linus Torvalds using an Apple MacBook Air M2, here are the first of many benchmark articles to come looking at how well Apple's M2 performs under Linux against Intel/AMD x86_64 competition. The new Apple MacBook Air with M2 was benchmarked for this article against the AMD Ryzen 7 PRO 6850U "Rembrandt" Zen 3+, Intel Core i7 1280P "Alder Lake P", and AMD Ryzen 9 5900HX "Cezanne H", and also for reference an Apple Mac Mini M1 model. All of these laptops were tested under Arch Linux (x86_64) and the Arch-based Asahi Linux (M1/M2).

https://www.phoronix.com/review/apple-m2-linux

[Anux]

Oh that was unexpected, if the 6850 ran with: Scaling Governor: acpi-cpufreq schedutil (Boost: Enabled) - Platform Profile: balanced - ACPI Profile: balanced.
then it seams to be even more efficient than M2?

To bad that the sensors aren't supported currently.

[birdie]

I'd love to see the configured TDP for the tested x86 laptops.

[timofonic]

Apple Silicon is overrated

[JEBjames]

Michael

Typo/Grammar on page 1

"is into good shape" should be "is in good shape"

[Alpha64]

Michael,

It is well-understood that the Macbook Airs (both generations) are slower than most of the other Apple Silicon macs in heavy multithreaded performance due to them being fanless. The M2 macbook air seems even more noticeable in this regard due to the higher power consumption of the SoC than the M1.

Also, the storage in the base model M2 devices (so far) has been significantly slower than the M1 generation due to using half of the NAND chips for the base models (previously using 2, now only using 1). From what is known at this point, it seems that the problem is only with the base-storage of 256GB.

Anyway, overall impressive showing, even considering these.

[galad]

x265 3.4 has got almost no aarch64 optimizations, you should at lest test the current master branch.

[Anux]

I'd love to see the configured TDP for the tested x86 laptops.

Just look at the previous tests of them.

[andre30correia]

the point here, why Asahi linux performe better in some tests?

[Ladis]

Michael,

It is well-understood that the Macbook Airs (both generations) are slower than most of the other Apple Silicon macs in heavy multithreaded performance due to them being fanless. The M2 macbook air seems even more noticeable in this regard due to the higher power consumption of the SoC than the M1.

Also, the storage in the base model M2 devices (so far) has been significantly slower than the M1 generation due to using half of the NAND chips for the base models (previously using 2, now only using 1). From what is known at this point, it seems that the problem is only with the base-storage of 256GB.

Anyway, overall impressive showing, even considering these.

Exactly. Air M1 was too amazing (Apple wanted to ensure people will like the switch to ARM64), so Apple had to cripple Air M2 to make consistent steps in the next models line. M2 consumes a bit more power (like newer Intel/AMD/NVidia chips), but Apple also decided for weaker/cheaper passive cooling (and there's no active cooling naturally in the Air models).

The storage problem is well known and affects only the cheapest model. Such capacity is not usable for people, who need to do a real work, so they take the 512GB+ models anyway.