Not really, no
Intel’s new mobile chip is likely very hot, and the company is quite pleased with it. Early benchmarks indicate that the Core i9-13980HX is a bit of a computational beast, especially when compared to Apple’s own M1 Max.
The M1 Max is the obvious comparison for the new chip, pitting Intel’s top-tier mobile silicon against the best Apple portables can offer. However, is this comparison truly valid?
So few hours, so many cores
First, the examinations.
PCWorld was permitted to run a Cinebench benchmark on an MSI laptop equipped with the new Intel Core i9-13980HX processor during CES in order to gauge the machine’s performance.
A score of approximately 31,000 is truly impressive. And it is significantly higher than the M1 Max’s multi-core score of approximately 12,000.
But how accurate is this comparison?
The Intel Core i9-13980HX has 24 cores, which is more than the average apple orchard. The Apple M1 Max has ten.
Given this, it is probably reasonable to assume that Intel’s chip is approximately 2.4 times faster. According to the numbers, it’s a bit higher than that.
Then there’s the fact that Intel just announced its new mobile chip, which is not yet available for purchase. The M1 Max was announced more than a year ago, in October 2021. We are awaiting Apple’s announcement of the M2 Max, which will presumably be faster per core than the previous model. It won’t have 24 of them, but if it did, you could anticipate it to score around 31,000 points.
Intel’s chip achieves a higher Cinebench score than Apple’s — as it should — when all is said and done.
It appears that Apple’s best MacBook chip will not soon be able to compete with that Core i9-13980HX. Also worth mentioning is the price of the MSI laptop that PCWorld was able to test. It will cost approximately $4300, a price that makes the 16-inch M1 Max MacBook Pro’s $3500 price tag seem cheap.
