AMD announced a new chip for thin-and-light notebooks that it specifically claims beats Apple’s year-old M2. Did the company cherry-pick results and hide the compromises, or is this a genuine triumph?
A couple of months ago, Intel came out with a “notebook” processor — the Intel Core i9 13980HX — that it claimed with a healthy dose of deception it could beat Apple’s M2 Max, currently Apple’s fastest processor. While the specific claims of benchmark triumphs in certain areas were technically true, those advances came with truckload of caveats.
In the case of the Intel chip, it completely lost all of its speed advantage the moment it went on battery, and drained the battery like a starving vampire at a blood bank — making it a very impractical “notebook” chip. Furthermore, it generated enormous amounts of heat that required fans at full blast when doing anything taxing — and was hopelessly overweight at almost seven pounds.
That said, for a very narrow set of specific but popular processor-intensive tasks — with the addition of a more-powerful video card, and keeping it plugged in at all times while wearing headphones to block the noise — it did indeed beat the M2 Max.
Read more at AppleInsider.com