August 8, 2026
Watt a comeback... or is it?
Can Intel finally beat ARM on performance per Watt?
Intel finally catches up — and the comments instantly turned into a food fight
TLDR: Intel’s new laptop chip matched Apple’s power efficiency in Jeff Geerling’s tests, a big deal because Apple has dominated battery-friendly performance for years. But the comments split hard: some called it a real comeback, while others mocked Intel for celebrating a tie with older Apple hardware.
Intel may have posted a rare good-news moment in the laptop power battle, but the real fireworks exploded in the comments. In Jeff Geerling’s test, Dell’s new XPS 13 with an Intel chip matched — and in one number, even beat — Apple’s MacBook on how much work it can do for each watt of electricity. That matters because Apple’s chips have spent years being the smug gold standard for long battery life and cool-running laptops.
But the crowd was not ready to hand Intel a crown. One side basically said, “Congrats on barely tying an old Apple chip, I guess?” with commenters roasting Intel for celebrating what they see as catching up to yesterday’s news. The harshest takes called it “legacy hardware destined for landfill” and demanded something truly shocking, not just “finally not embarrassing.” Ouch.
The other camp was more impressed, calling the efficiency jump genuinely exciting — especially for people who want better battery life without being locked into Apple’s world. Still, even the fans added a giant asterisk: Apple was reportedly still much better at graphics and snappier in other day-to-day tasks. Translation: Intel may have won one very nerdy contest, but the internet is arguing over whether that means it won anything that normal people would actually feel.
And of course, there was classic comment-section snark: one person bypassed the article entirely to post Jeff’s original write-up, while another joked Intel has now beaten “even TSMC,” which is the kind of deep-cut chip-fandom humor that keeps these threads deliciously chaotic.
Key Points
- •Jeff Geerling compared a MacBook Neo and Dell’s latest XPS 13 and published supporting benchmarks on GitHub.
- •The article focuses on performance per watt as the most significant metric because ARM and Apple Silicon have been known for energy efficiency.
- •In Geerling’s HPL Linpack-based Top500 test, the MacBook posted 57.012 Gflops at 10.6W, or 5.38 Gflops/W.
- •In the same test, the Dell XPS 13 posted 127.91 Gflops at 20.6W, or 6.21 Gflops/W, exceeding the MacBook’s efficiency in that benchmark.
- •The article argues the Intel Core 5 320 result suggests chip design may matter more than instruction set architecture alone in explaining power efficiency.