--- title: Want Energy Efficiency? Dude, You’re Getting A Dell! description: Jeff Geerling benchmarks the Dell XPS 13 (Intel Core 5 320) against the MacBook Neo using the HPL Linpack test, and the results are surprising: the Dell... canonical: https://daily.dev/posts/want-energy-efficiency-dude-you-re-getting-a-dell--bjhow4pac twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:site: @dailydotdev og:type: website og:site_name: daily.dev og:title: Want Energy Efficiency? Dude, You’re Getting A Dell! | daily.dev og:description: Jeff Geerling benchmarks the Dell XPS 13 (Intel Core 5 320) against the MacBook Neo using the HPL Linpack test, and the results are surprising: the Dell... og:url: https://daily.dev/posts/want-energy-efficiency-dude-you-re-getting-a-dell--bjhow4pac og:image: https://api.daily.dev/og/posts/BjHOW4pAc.png og:image:alt: Want Energy Efficiency? Dude, You’re Getting A Dell! og:image:width: 1200 og:image:height: 630 og:locale: en --- > ## Documentation Index > Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://daily.dev/llms.txt > Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further. # Want Energy Efficiency? Dude, You’re Getting A Dell! **[Hackaday](https://daily.dev/sources/hackaday)** · 2 min read · 1 upvotes · 0 comments ## Summary Jeff Geerling benchmarks the Dell XPS 13 (Intel Core 5 320) against the MacBook Neo using the HPL Linpack test, and the results are surprising: the Dell achieves 6.21 Gflops/W versus the MacBook's 5.38 Gflops/W, outperforming both M4 and M3 Mac Studios. The Dell only falls short of the M4 Mac Mini at 7.57 Gflops/W. Even at idle and during web browsing, the XPS matches Apple Silicon's energy efficiency. The results suggest that ARM's power efficiency advantage over x86 may have been more about chip design than instruction architecture, and Intel's latest silicon is closing the gap. ## Full article daily.dev links to this article rather than hosting it. Read it at the original source: ## Questions this post answers ### How does the Dell XPS 13 with the Core 5 320 chip compare to Apple Silicon in energy efficiency benchmarks? The Dell XPS 13 with the Core 5 320 chip achieved 127.91 Gflops at 20.6W, working out to 6.21 Gflops per watt, compared to a MacBook that reached 57.012 Gflops at 10.6W, or 5.38 Gflops per watt, on the HPL Linpack Top500 benchmark. This Dell also outperformed the M4 and M3 Mac Studios, only losing to the M4 Mac Mini's 7.57 Gflops per watt. _Comparing x86 and ARM efficiency claims before a laptop purchase is easier with benchmark coverage on daily.dev._ ## Community take How the wider developer community reacted, aggregated from 1 discussion and 69 comments across hackernews (as of 2026-09-14). **TL;DR:** Commenters are cautiously impressed that Intel's new chip is finally competitive with Apple Silicon on energy efficiency, but many note the benchmark (HPL FP64) is narrow and unrepresentative, and question whether Intel can scale this efficiency to higher-performance chips. **Sentiment:** 35% positive · 45% mixed · 20% skeptical **The case for** - The Dell's efficiency in HPL benchmarks beats M4/M3 Mac Studios and even matches Apple Silicon at idle and during web browsing. - Intel appears to have genuinely shifted philosophy away from pushing clocks toward tuning for efficiency, which is a meaningful change. - The fan allows the Intel system to sustain performance longer on extended workloads where the fanless Neo thermally throttles. - Intel's 18A process (manufactured in North America) appears to be a real technological step forward. **The pushback** - HPL is an FP64 supercomputing benchmark that most consumers never use, making the efficiency claim narrow and potentially misleading. - The Apple Neo chip is a phone-class chip, not Apple's best (M5), so the comparison isn't against Apple's top silicon. - The iGPU on the Intel chip is still notably weaker than Apple Silicon's GPU. - The laptop has only two USB-C ports and no headphone jack, which commenters find frustrating for a device this size. - Broader real-world Linux GPU/browser performance on Intel integrated graphics remains a concern for non-Windows users. **By community** - hackernews (mixed): Cautiously optimistic about Intel's efficiency progress but skeptical the FP64 benchmark generalizes, and divided on whether this truly closes the gap with Apple Silicon. **Hottest debate:** Whether the HPL FP64 benchmark result is meaningful evidence of general energy efficiency or a cherry-picked metric that flatters Intel while obscuring Apple Silicon's broader advantages. **Open questions** - Can Intel apply this efficiency philosophy to higher-TDP desktop and server chips? - How does the Dell XPS 13 compare in real-world integer and everyday workloads rather than FP64? - Will Intel's next generation (e.g., an N100-successor with newer E-cores) extend these gains further? - Does the efficiency advantage hold under sustained workloads when accounting for the full system (screen, motherboard, OS)? **Highlights** > Not only that, the efficiency (FP64, HPL) is also beating all the M4/M3/M2/M1 systems I've tested besides the M4 Mac mini: https://github.com/geerlingguy/top500-benchmark#results I think the bigger news is Intel's made a chip that isn't just pushing clocks to hit some performance number, they've actually tuned clocks for efficiency... which also leads to much better battery life. And the fan on the system in the original article[1] also allows the Intel system to run substantially faster for longer tasks (where the Neo thermally saturates and has to stay throttled). (The iGPU is another matter... sadly still a bit lacking.) I'm hoping Intel makes a follow-up to the N100-series chips with just four of their newer low power E-cores. [1] https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2026/excited-for-intel-eff... > — [geerlingguy on hackernews · 2 comments](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49224641) > It's long been possible (since Alder Lake at the latest) to tune Intel CPUs for task energy consumption competitive with Apple Silicon, but bone-headed OEMs including Apple always tuned them the other way, wasting a lot of power for tiny performance gains. It is inappropriate to say that you evaluated the perf per watt on a Core Ultra 7 265K because what you really evaluated was how HP, Lenovo, or Dell configured that chip. But for years it has been the case that with one of the Atom variants (Gracemont, Skymont, ___mont) tuned to non-ridiculous scaling modes (capped at 2GHz, say) the energy story is quite good. The Apple platform does not have eager scaling and this is part of their efficiency story. > — [jeffbee on hackernews](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49226301) > I think the Top500 benchmark is biased here. It’s a supercomputing benchmark which means it’s going to heavily weight SIMD and float64 performance, which are things that rarely matter for everyday computing. SIMD has uses in the real world - image or video editing, data crunching, graphics. But consumers basically never use fp64 any more, and so many modern chips have next to zero performance on them. That could easily skew the numbers in intel’s favor. > — [oofbey on hackernews · 2 comments](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49224892) > These tests were done on the CPU cores, not on the GPU. In every test I ran the A18 chip blew past Intel's Core 5 on GPU performance. There were a series of other benchmarks too, but the Hackaday article only highlights HPL as that was the benchmark that changed my perspective on Intel a bit. This was the first X86 chip to trade blows in efficiency (and idle power draw) with Apple's M3/M4 (I don't have any M5 to test with right now). > — [geerlingguy on hackernews](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49225744) > I think the Top500 benchmark is biased here. It’s a supercomputing benchmark which means it’s going to heavily weight SIMD and float64 performance, which are things that rarely matter for everyday computing. SIMD has uses in the real world - image or video editing, data crunching, graphics. But consumers basically never use fp64 any more, and so many modern chips have next to zero performance on them. That could easily skew the numbers in intel’s favor. > — [oofbey on hackernews · 2 comments](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49224892) **Source threads** - [hackernews](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49223079) · 137 points · 69 comments ## Similar posts on daily.dev - [I'm excited for Intel after testing the XPS 13](https://daily.dev/posts/i-m-excited-for-intel-after-testing-the-xps-13-il5ilne7j) · Jeff Geerling · 0 upvotes · 0 comments - [Dell's XPS 13 is the laptop I'd recommend, except for this one problem](https://daily.dev/posts/dell-s-xps-13-is-the-laptop-i-d-recommend-except-for-this-one-problem-1uyn39dus) · XDA Developers · 0 upvotes · 0 comments - [Dell is on a roll with the XPS](https://daily.dev/posts/dell-is-on-a-roll-with-the-xps-j8ttwtbox) · David Heinemeier Hansson · 5 upvotes · 0 comments --- Tags: [#intel](https://daily.dev/tags/intel), [#arm](https://daily.dev/tags/arm) [View this post on daily.dev](https://daily.dev/posts/want-energy-efficiency-dude-you-re-getting-a-dell--bjhow4pac) ```json {"@context":"https://schema.org","@graph":[{"@type":"Organization","@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization","name":"daily.dev","url":"https://daily.dev","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://daily.dev/apple-touch-icon.png","width":180,"height":180},"sameAs":["https://twitter.com/dailydotdev","https://github.com/dailydotdev","https://www.linkedin.com/company/daily-dev-ltd"]},{"@type":"WebSite","@id":"https://daily.dev/#website","url":"https://daily.dev","name":"daily.dev","publisher":{"@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization"},"potentialAction":{"@type":"SearchAction","target":{"@type":"EntryPoint","urlTemplate":"https://daily.dev/search?q={search_term_string}"},"query-input":"required name=search_term_string"}}]} {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"TechArticle","headline":"Want Energy Efficiency? 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