Wow the hits keep coming, the new Mac Studio looks incredible! I am not a Mac lover, but their new products may change my mind.
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You don't compare M1 Ultra to 12th gen. M1 Max and Ultra are large SOC's with on package LPDDR5 while Alder Lake is just a CPU with integrated GPU. If you look at the M1 floorplan you'll notice that CPU is almost a negligible part of the die. The GPU is much more substantial but a significant part of the SOC is various hard IP such as the neural engine, media encoders, ISP, etc. The relatively insignificant silicon area taken up by the CPU in the M1 Ultra tells you all you need to know - CPU is becoming increasingly insignificant for modern workloads. The heaviest consumer workloads such as gaming, video editing, rendering, etc have all moved to GPU or hardware encoders as these work much better than CPU processing. The trend of specialized hardware will continue to marginalize the need for increasing the CPU cores, at least for client.
I was looking at a teardown video, it's piece of amazing engineering
How does it compare to Alder Lake i9?