Rather than the Hackaday article, which doesn't add anything to the original, here's Jeff's actual video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A2B7oI0FYqo
and post:
https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2026/excited-for-intel-eff...
No headphone jack! Why Dell?
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/...
> no headphone jack
Agreed, losing the headphone jack on something the size of a phone was already questionable space saving for a bigger battery. But on something the size of a laptop, it is a joke. I'm sure it has more to do with saving $1 per laptop than any user benefit.
Many headphones can do audio over usb-c if you want a wired connection. If you want to use a fully analog set of cans, you can also just get a usb-c to 3.5mm adapter for a few bucks.
No need for wireless and battery, just not the plug you were expecting.
The improved efficiency is great!
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?
Apple has been working ruthlessly on battery efficiency for a long time because of the phones and their tendency to minimize battery sizes on Macs for thinness.
The exact design of the cores, how they’re scheduled, the way background stuff is handled on MacOS. All of it. The chips are made on a fantastic process too, but that alone isn’t it. For example they’ve been putting the ability to drop refresh rate really low when nothing changes to more and more of their machines.
It could be that the Intel chip is close, IDK.
But add in other motherboard components, the screen, the OS, the software and system libraries, all are optimized together to hit those numbers. And any of those alone or in combination could be part of the differences.
I think the Top500 benchmark is biased here. It’s a supercomputing benchmark which means it’s going to heavily weight SIMD and float64 performance, which are things that rarely matter for everyday computing. SIMD has uses in the real world - image or video editing, data crunching, graphics. But consumers basically never use fp64 any more, and so many modern chips have next to zero performance on them. That could easily skew the numbers in intel’s favor.
I run a number of other benchmarks for a better comparison (linked from my blog post: https://github.com/geerlingguy/sbc-reviews/issues/111).
The Intel chip holds its own for multicore in less bursty workloads, where the fans help.
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Yes, it seems to be a new process, 18A. (18 Ångström, allegedly). Manufactured in North America. If the shiny video they did didn't fool me, it's a two sided wafer process, power grid on one side, then the silicon wafer (with through-silicon vias), then transistors, then signal layers.
The processor is this one: Intel Core 5 processor 320 https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/sku/246018/... in the Wildcat Lake series.
> And remember the Apple Neo is running an iPhone CPU that is much slower than the M series.
We really need to get over generalization like "phone CPU". Times have changed. Phone or not really isn't the focus.
Per core the A series (cough phone) isn't that much slower than equivalent M series. It's literally the same family just with some extra features, more power, etc.
I suspect that the comment is more about this not being Apple’s best standard consumer CPU for computers, which would be the M5 (though to your point that’s also in iPads).
It’s good Intel can match anything while staying cool and efficient. That’s a great step. But I’d like to see them match the M5.
Phone is a sort of short hand for what tradeoffs are likely in the chip. A phone processor is going to prioritize efficiency and thermals over raw performance. Mobile will strike a different balance. While desktop likely prioritizes raw power over performance per watt, thermals be damned!
Of course, that same "phone" processor gets to operate with battery and thermal headroom of a laptop in the Macbook Neo. The bigger trade-offs are due to the device the chip operates within.
Phones have markedly different thermal limits compared to desktop or even laptops. A laptop CPU can easily suck 30W or more while a phone might not ever reach 10W.
Whoever used the most recent TSMC node will have the best specs.
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.
A more accurate title is can Intel (Linux/Windows) beat Apple?
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.
You might want to try getting the Nvidia GPU working. They're several times faster than intel integrated, and browsers are a GPU-heavy application.
Intel keeps trying to say their integrated graphics are finally decently fast, but that's only a select few special models. Their high-volume chips continue to have integrated GPUs that are barely fast enough for web browsing.
My servers run linux, my customers run windows, but if I run Mac that only adds to my complexity. So all our dev boxes run Linux.
I’m running CachyOS (based on arch) and it is blazing fast. Both with Firefox and Vivaldi. Especially compared to the windows install I used to have on the same machine. Or is your point only about windows?
Intel wins, in HPL FP64. Its a stretch to take a single metric and apply it's outcome broadly to the chip's general functionality. Especially when by large the A18 chip with half the power requirement beats it in almost every other benchmark.
M4's GPU does not support 64 float. So, yeah. No hardware support, so what are you expecting? The fact that it comes close is pretty impressive.
These tests were done on the CPU cores, not on the GPU. In every test I ran the A18 chip blew past Intel's Core 5 on GPU performance.
There were a series of other benchmarks too, but the Hackaday article only highlights HPL as that was the benchmark that changed my perspective on Intel a bit. This was the first X86 chip to trade blows in efficiency (and idle power draw) with Apple's M3/M4 (I don't have any M5 to test with right now).
This is interesting but what I would love to see is Mac M4/M5 performance (speed) on an Intel laptop CPU. I know that it will be really difficult to pull off (assuming it's achievable at all) given that Intel just makes the CPU and the computer manufacturers for PCs don't do the kind of tuning that Apple is able to do, but still, I can't help but hope that maybe it can be done somehow. Maybe even while making the machines still serviceable! (Yes yes, I know, but a man can dream...)
Well, they beat even TSMC on performance so they’re at least halfway there.
Why people are excited about Intel barely matching already outdated CPUs of the competition?
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.
Comments like this one remind me of all the people saying "China can't invent things, they can only copy the US" 20 years ago.
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?
Not only that, the efficiency (FP64, HPL) is also beating all the M4/M3/M2/M1 systems I've tested besides the M4 Mac mini: https://github.com/geerlingguy/top500-benchmark#results
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 is one thing.
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.
Ok so Intel managed to make a 20W TDP chip that gets 6.x Gflops/W. Call me back when they’ve got a chip that still gets 6.x Gf/W with a 200W 1,200Gflop package like the M3 next on your list. This little fellow is only 50% more efficient than my aging M1 Max!
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).
> 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.
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.
Yeah, the first step is they realize pushing clocks is not the most important thing; second step is to apply that to other chips they make too! I want to see more desktop and server chips getting closer to Arm efficiency.
I don’t think it’s completely unfair to say that the Neo is based on a chip that was first announced in Sep 2024 while the Intel chip is from Apr 2026.
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…
Plus it’s a phone chip. Yeah it’s used in the Neo but it’s no M5.
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.
I haven’t followed the PC chip business anywhere near as much as I used to around the turn of the millennium. I was under the impression Intel actually made a few chips that could go quite low power. The problem was their performance sucked.
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.
> Comments like this one remind me of all the people saying "China can't invent things, they can only copy the US" 20 years ago.
We still get these comments. Now about AI. China can only distill and are still years behind. Well well...
Really curious to see how ByteDance’s 10T model works out.
If you normalise for both process node and clock speed, AMD and Apple are tied on single threaded perf/watt, and AMD Zen 5c cores have about a 12% perf/area advantage.
Thank you - especially for linking the article.