Can Intel finally beat ARM on performance per Watt?
https://hackaday.com/2026/08/08/want-energy-efficiency-dude-youre-getting-a-dell/https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A2B7oI0FYqo
and post:
https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2026/excited-for-intel-eff...
> no headphone jack
The Apple Neo was still 2x faster for graphics and around 1.4x faster for single core cpu. And remember the Apple Neo is running an iPhone CPU that is much slower than the M series.
It is strange that this chip is so crazy efficient though. I would love to know the details of exactly why it is? It seems like some new tech or process?
I do want 1.5x battery life for free out of my next laptop. Who wouldn’t?
If you don't want to run Windows, is there even a choice? My issue now with the non-Apple computers if you want to run Linux it's really hard to predict how awful Chromium/Firefox will be. My work Dell Laptop is only a 3 year old CPU with integrated GPU (and unused Nvidia GPU) but Chromium and Firefox are both slow as shit just loading pages like Slack and Outlook. Even resizing the browser windows seems 4-5x times slower than my M3 Macbook Air.
Maybe this is strictly a Linux issue but it hardly matters when the Windows ecosystem is pretty stagnant, full of junk-ware, and software development is much, much better on Linux/MacOS.
Shouldn't we be concerned that the company instead of aiming for the leap is producing legacy hardware destined for landfill?
Wake me up when Intel produces something groundbreaking.
Like, we're comparing a new Dell to a Mac released only 4 months ago. How did you feel about the Mac Neo then, and now? Is it also legacy hardware destined for the landfill?
I think the bigger news is Intel's made a chip that isn't just pushing clocks to hit some performance number, they've actually tuned clocks for efficiency... which also leads to much better battery life.
And the fan on the system in the original article[1] also allows the Intel system to run substantially faster for longer tasks (where the Neo thermally saturates and has to stay throttled).
(The iGPU is another matter... sadly still a bit lacking.)
I'm hoping Intel makes a follow-up to the N100-series chips with just four of their newer low power E-cores.
[1] https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2026/excited-for-intel-eff...
Efficiency and performance is another.
We've long known that pushing clock speeds results in diminishing efficiency, so it's about time we see Intel stop pushing the clocks (and power) so hard that the chip melts down and the battery drains quickly.
It’s great that they are making progress. Competition is good. They certainly need good news right now. I have exactly one intel cpu in my house in a NUC I got off eBay and it’s about to be replaced by my M4 mini. My other x86 are Zen (threadripper, 5800x3d, 5950s).
Do some tests pre and post upgrade. It’s ridiculous how efficient the mini is. My power usage is about 1/12 what it was with a Nuc.
Also, I think the battery life most people are practically interested in is more like running (close to) idle and less like the number of Watts spent when running maxed out, and I wouldn’t be surprised if Arm chips still win on that metric…
It’s good Intel got to this point, but you can’t declare them tied with Apple. They qualified for the real race, which us great, but they're not going to win with that chip.
Moreover, from tfa:
> This Dell also beats out both M4 and M3 Mac Studios, only failing to the M4 Mac Mini at 7.57 Gflops/W.
It’s good that this performs good and can go low power, but the big question to me is whether they can scale it up without it becoming a power sucking furnace.
There’s no other comment somewhere in here, where someone is pointing out that that was in FP64, which is not something most people use. Especially people who are going to buy a computer like this.
I suspect for me personally, integer use matters far, far, far more than anything else.
We still get these comments. Now about AI. China can only distill and are still years behind. Well well...
My guess is that even the designs of the transistors and perhaps logic gates are IP blocks owned by TSMC and not whoever wants to get their chip fabricated.
The processor is a Intel Core 5 320 Wildcat lake, with 4 "low power efficient cores" and 2 non-hyperthreaded Performance-cores.
It's variant of Panther Lake which has some models with Arc GPUs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panther_Lake_(microprocessor)
https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/sku/246018/...