Apple M2 vs. AMD Ryzen 7 PRO 6850U Performance In Nearly 200 Benchmarks

Last week I published initial Apple M2 vs. AMD Rembrandt vs. Intel Alder Lake Linux benchmarks using Asahi Linux and Arch Linux across the board. For ending out this week, here is a follow-up article looking more closely at the Apple M2 in the MacBook Air against the AMD Ryzen 7 PRO 6850U "Rembrandt" within the Lenovo ThinkPad X13 Gen3. This time around are also results from performance tweaks to each laptop for the CPUFreq governor and platform profile.

With last week's article, all of the Apple/Intel/AMD laptops under test were using their stock configurations on Asahi Linux / Arch Linux. Among those defaults was the ThinkPad X13 Gen3 running in its "balanced" ACPI platform profile for power/performance preference and also using the CPUFreq Schedutil governor that makes use of the scheduler utilization data for CPU frequency scaling decisions. This article has those stock benchmarks as well as going for "max perf" by setting the ACPI Platform Profile to its performance mode as well as moving from the schedutil governor over to the "performance" governor that changes the CPU frequency scaling behavior of the system.

Meanwhile on the Apple side was a similar change: moving from ACPI CPUFreq Schedutil that is used by default over to the "performance" governor too. So both the Apple MacBook Air M2 and Lenovo Thinkpad X13 Gen3 with AMD Ryzen 7 PRO 6850U are in their stock Arch/Asahi Linux configuration and then with the adjustments for the more performance optimized mode.

Due to the Apple M2 currently lacking any power/temperature sensor support under Linux, this is simply looking at the raw performance of the M2 and Ryzen 7 PRO 6850U with not being able to accurately compare the M2 power efficiency / performance-per-Watt at this time.