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

The GEGL image library is used by GIMP and other software on Linux.

In most benchmarks, the performance governor (and ACPI Platform Profile's performance mode for the X13 Gen3) represented small but measurable improvements over the stock configuration.

Over the span of 190 benchmarks carried out, the AMD Ryzen 7 PRO 6850U and Apple M2 were effectively dead-split when it came to the number of first place finishes... In 40% of the benchmarks, the Ryzen 7 PRO 6850U in its "performance" mode came out in front and picked up first place finishes in another 10% of the benchmarks with its stock configuration. Meanwhile 49% of the time, the Apple M2 performance either in the stock or performance governor configuration were out in front.

If taking the geometric mean of all the benchmarks, setting the performance governor on the M2 improved the performance over schedutil by 5%. Meanwhile setting the performance governor and performance platform profile on the Lenovo ThinkPad X13 Gen3 by about 4%. In the performance modes, the AMD Ryzen 7 PRO 6850U was faster overall than the AMD Ryzen 7 PRO 6850U by 12% based on the 190 benchmarks carried out for this article. Of course, it largely comes down to the subset of workloads you care about for ultimately how viable the Apple M2 on Linux is comparable to AMD Rembrandt. It's also a matter of Apple Silicon on Linux support limitations right now like if needing accelerated graphics support (still a long ways out before being completed) or other hardware support caveats.

In any event it's great seeing the Apple M2 working as well as it is so far on Linux. Those wishing to go through all 190 benchmark results in full can see this result page for all the numbers. Hopefully it won't be too long before there is power and thermal HWMON support for the Apple M2/M1 on Linux for being able to dive into the power efficiency against Intel and AMD CPUs on Linux.