Apple M2 vs. AMD Rembrandt vs. Intel Alder Lake Linux Benchmarks

In total I ran 190 benchmarks across the MacBook Air M2, Mac Mini M1, Ryzen 7 PRO 6850U with the ThinkPad X13 Gen3, Core i7 1280P with MSI Evo notebook, and Ryzen 9 5900HX with ASUS ROG G513Qy. For straight-up first place finishes, the Ryzen 9 5900HX led to little surprise. The Apple MacBook Air M2 model did come in first place around 27% of the time and then the M1 even came in first a handful of times for the heavy multi-threaded workloads where the Apple Silicon was performing well but M2 regressing.

When taking the geometric mean of all 190 benchmarks ran on the five devices with Asahi Linux / Arch Linux, the Apple MacBook Air M2 came in just behind the Core i7 1280P. The Core i7 1280P was just about 8% faster for raw performance while the Ryzen 7 6850U Zen 3+ SoC was 14% faster than the M2 MacBook Air tested. Those wishing to go through all 190 individual benchmarks in full can do so via this result page.

Overall the Asahi Linux experience on the Apple M2 exceeded my initial expectations. The CPU performance was quite competitive, ignoring Linux's lack of support for Apple Silicon's Neural Engine or GPU yet. The performance-per-Watt likely comes out ahead of the AMD and Intel CPUs given the raw performance results and how unusually cool the MacBook Air remained during the benchmarking in comparison to the Intel / AMD laptops. But for lack of SoC power consumption monitoring under Linux yet for the M2, there isn't any firm numbers to share at this time. But given the competitive raw performance, it's suffice to say that the M2 likely leads in performance-per-Watt in at least most of the tests.

While the CPU results are quite positive, Linux on the Apple M2 isn't ready for most users as a daily driver yet. If you are a developer mostly in the terminal and a text editor / IDE for long portions of the time, the Apple M2 is fascinating for being a performant AArch64 option and at a reasonable price compared to the costs of many Arm reference boards, etc. But if you are expecting GPU and video acceleration, you will likely be waiting a number of months before that open-source driver support comes together -- and even more months if expecting Vulkan support and gaming.

There was also the issue encountered with a number of heavy, multi-threaded workloads where the M2 performance was behind that of the M1, presumably due to some thermal/power related bits still to address with the M2 on Linux. It will also be interesting to see with time once Linux is able to initialize and use the Apple Silicon GPU how much of a power budget for the SoC that the GPU will eat into and whether it will end up limiting some of the CPU performance wins seen today.

The Asahi Wiki outlines other support limitations right now for the M1 and M2: with the new M2 MacBook Air and MacBook Pro there isn't yet microphone / 3.5mm / internal speaker support as likely another blocker for daily use. The web camera support is a work-in-progress. If not wanting to use Asahi Linux but your own Linux distribution of preference, it will likely be quite some time before all these patches are cleaned up, reviewed, and upstreamed into the Linux kernel. There are also install challenges around setting up the Apple Silicon systems into a state that can boot into Linux due to security permissions, partitioning, etc. Asahi Linux has made the install process remarkably easy on the M1/M2 but will take work for other Linux distributions to adapt if wishing to pursue Apple Silicon support.

Stay tuned for more Apple M2 Linux benchmarks on Phoronix. If you enjoy all my relentless benchmarking and hardware testing, consider joining Phoronix Premium or at the very least to disable any ad-blocker.