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

Etcpak as an open-source ETC texture compressor showed the Intel/AMD processors performing much faster than the Apple M2 (and M1), which some of the difference may also be attributed to Etcpak not as being well-tuned for the Apple Silicon / AArch64 and similarly the system compiler not being as well tuned for Apple's in-house ARM64 CPU, but for end-users this is the experience.

While shifting over to other workloads like the Leela Chess Zero (LC0) chess engine leveraging neural networks, the Apple Silicon performed incredibly well and ahead of the x86_64 competition. But as you may notice, the M1 was actually much faster than the M2...

The M1 performing much faster than the M2 in some workloads was a head-scratcher at first, but this also came up in other heavy multi-threaded workloads. It would appear that for some workloads -- in particular the heavy multi-threaded tests -- the M2 trails the M1 on Asahi Linux presumably due to some missing thermal/power management bits. While that's unfortunate, at least going off the M1 Mac Mini results, in some of these workloads Apple Silicon has the potential of running competitively against these current-generation Intel and AMD laptops.

For creators dealing with a lot of WebP image encoding, the M2 performance on Asahi Linux was only slightly behind that of the tested x86_64 laptops.

For developers doing a lot of JSON crunching/analysis, the M2 wasn't too far behind the AMD laptops tested.