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

To recap the systems tested for this comparison included:

Apple Mac Mini - M1 8GB model
Apple MacBook Air - M2 8GB model
MSI MS-14C6 Evo notebook - Intel Core i7 1280P "Alder Lake P"
ASUS G512QY - Ryzen 9 5900HX "Cezane H"
ThinkPad X13 Gen3 - Ryzen 7 PRO 6850U "Rembrandt"

All of the devices were freshly tested/re-tested under Asahi Linux with the Apple Silicon or upstream Arch Linux for the x86_64 hardware. All the prominent system details and other information below. Testing was obviously limited to the hardware I had available.

Unfortunately for testing, as mentioned, right now there is no Linux driver exposing the M2 SoC power consumption under Linux. Hopefully this will be addressed in time but unfortunately meant not being able to deliver any accurate performance-per-Watt / power consumption benchmarks in this article. But when such support does come, it will likely show the M2 indeed delivering much better power efficiency than the Intel and AMD laptops tested. Even under demanding multi-threaded workloads, the M2 MacBook Air was not nearly as warm as the other laptops tested. It's a night and day difference of the M2 MacBook Air still being cool to warm compared to the likes of other notebooks like especially Dell XPS laptops that get outright hot under load. The power consumption metrics should also be more useful/relevant once Linux has working M1/M2 GPU support in place too.