MAY 2021 • TECH ADVISOR 15What you can
question is whether
Intel picked tasks that
favour its own CPU
design. But even if
you believed that,
it doesn’t invalidate
the testing, because
exportingtoa PDF
isabout as real as
you can get.
We’dalso
beremissif wedidn’tpointoutthat
WebXPRT3 gives home-fieldadvantage
toIntel,asthebenchmarkdeveloper
(PrincipledTechnologies)andIntelhave
longhada relationship.That,however,
doesn’tnecessarilymeanthebenchmark
favoursIntel,asAMD’sZen3 currently
hastheleadoverIntel’smobileCPUs.
Nonetheless,Applefanswillsaysome
foulsgotmissedbytherefshere.
CLAIM:COREi
CRUSHESM1INAI
Forcontentcreationtasks,Intelshowed
theCorei7 tobeabout1.12xfaster
thantheM1in performinga 4KAVC-
to-HEVC/H.265file conversion.In this
benchmark,theyhadtheMacBook
usingthe M1-native version of
HandBrake. But the real destruction
happens once you get to Topaz
Lab’s Gigapixel AI and Denoise AI,
with the Intel Core chip crushing the
M1 in AI-based noise removal and
enlargement. Or maybe ‘crushing’ is too
nice a term, as it’s more like the Core i
outpaces the M1 by so much, the M
wishes it had never been designed.Our take: As far as the video conversion
goes, we think it’s too close to call
between both platforms, and probably
not something we’d gloat about if we
were Intel. However, on the AI features,
we think the results are pretty real,
because we have witnessed it ourselves
with our own M1 vs Core i7 and Ryzen
tests. The 11th gen Core i7-1185G7 so
thoroughly thrashes AMD’s Ryzen 4000U
and Apple’s M that we thought about
calling 999 forsomeonetogooutto
thehouse and do a welfare check.
We should point out that Topaz
Lab’s apps are among the few (but