Well, Intel's latest numbers on their newest CPUs are out, and it's not looking so good. Three years ago when Apple launched the M1SOC or System on Chip, their own Apple Silicon, and they booted Intel out of their computers, it showed the world how getting a bit too comfortable in your dominance is not a good idea. Ever since then, Intel has been playing catch-up or trying to play catch-up, hiring Apple talent and re-architecting and rebranding their CPUs, and while the hot and inefficient Core i9 and i7 are still around and have just been updated to the latest 14th generation, Intel simultaneously announced a new line of Core Ultra Processors. These are supposed to take a page out of Apple's Playbook and focus on efficiency, and also AI, because you gotta put that in everything now, right? Did you see the new delts? They have a dedicated AI co-pilot button. So these new chips are Intel's largest architectural shift in 40 years of chip making. That's how long they've been sitting comfortably. I don't know about you, but if I was told I was brushing my teeth wrong all my life and had to change, it wouldn't be an easy change either. Use an electric toothbrush! Okay, speaking of delt, there are already including this new line of chips in their latest XPS14 and XPS16 machines, which I'd like to get my hands on as soon as possible, so I can test them out. The newest line up of Intel chips is called Media Lake, and includes Core Ultra 5, 7, and 9, with the 9 having 16 cores total and a built-in GPU just like the latest M3 Max chip from Apple, which I've been testing along with these other ones for software developers. The difference here is that the M3 Max has a ridiculous 12 P cores or performance cores while the Core Ultra 9 has just 6. We don't have any test info yet on the Ultra 9, which is the biggest and baddest house cat of all processors, but Tom's hardware just posted some pretty disappointing numbers about the Core Ultra 7, which actually by the way has the same number of P cores and E cores as the flagship Ultra 9, just a little less power. Now this Tom's hardware data actually comes from David Wang's blog. He's a Microsoft researcher who used this spec into 2017, a single threaded performance test which is compiled using GCC, targeted for the current platform of the test. I'll link to this down below so you can check it out. According to this test, the Ultra 7's P cores scored lower than both the 30th generation Core i9 and Core i7, worse than AMD's Ryzen 9, Ryzen 7, and Ryzen 5, and way worse than Apple's M3 Pro and even M2 Pro, and even the plain M2. What are your thoughts on this performance gap between Intel and Apple's CPUs? Do you think the efficiency should be prioritized over raw power? Drop your opinions in the comments below. I'm curious to hear your perspectives. And also you might notice that this is a single threaded operation, and you might wonder why should we care about single core stats in a world where we keep adding more and more cores to our processors because multi-core performance matters as well? Well it's simple. Many applications, especially in the coding world, still rely heavily on single core efficiency. I've shown this many times on the channel. We're doing JavaScript applications, not just compilation, but also the snappiness of your environment and the IDE. All that relies on single core operations. I was looking through the Tom's hardware post and indicates a caveat to Heng's test is that the Ultra 7 is being compared to a Core i7 with DDR5 RAM as opposed to LP DDR5. DDR5, memory is the regular double data rate RAM while the LP DDR5 is the low power version of DDR, which is a bit slower, but it's more efficient and it targets mobile devices. Some laptops have DDR memory while others have LP DDR. But guess what? All the Apple M series chips use LP DDR, and they seem to be doing okay more than okay in this test. So while memory might be a good excuse, I don't think it flies here. The post also goes on to presume that perhaps Intel is not really focused on CPU performance here is more focused on their in-house GPU that they built into the chip, which will target the latest and machine learning and AI landscape. For software developers, the inclusion of AI-focused improvements is a huge deal. Think about running complex machine learning models or AI-powered code analysis tools. This could be a game changer in our workflow. So perhaps the new chips will do well in that area. It's too early to call it because we still need to have the real world test done and also look at the ultra-9, which gets fed a little bit more power according to Intel's tables. That's why you need to stay tuned and subscribe for upcoming tests and reviews on this channel. Overall, I'd like to add that I'm actually rooting for Intel to do well here. It can be only Apple that makes the most performance-per-wide machines out there because if they go on for too long, who knows what they will start charging for the next set of MacBooks? Yikes! Competition breeds innovation and keeps prices in check. Intel and Qualcomm are playing catch-up here and 2024 is going to be interesting to see who gets ahead or who stays ahead. I recently made a video on what Qualcomm is doing to catch-up to Apple, so check that out right over here. Thanks for watching and I'll see you in the next one.