Apple M1 8-Core GPU vs Intel Arc A530M

Apple M1 8-Core GPU

The Apple M1 GPU is an integrated graphics card offering 8 cores (1 deactivated core in the entry MacBook Air) designed by Apple and integrated in the Apple M1 SoC. According to Apple it is faster and more energy efficient as competing products (like the Tiger Lake Xe GPU). The peak performance of the high end variant is 2.6 teraflops and thanks to the unified memory architecture it should have fast access to the RAM.

The Apple M1 is manufactured in the modern 5nm process at TSMC and should offer an excellent energy efficiency. According to internal tools, the M1 GPU uses under load approximately 10 Watt (11.5 Watt package power including the RAM).

Intel Arc A530M

The Intel Arc A530M (device ID 5697) is a dedicated mobile lower- mid-range graphics card for laptops based on Xe HPG microarchitecture. It uses the ACM-G12 chip and offers 12 of the 16 Xe-cores (192 ALUs), 12 ray tracing units and a 128-bit memory bus for 8 GB GDDR6 graphics memory. The cores can clock from 300 MHz (low frequency mode) to 1300 MHz (high frequency) or in short bursts 2050+ MHz (short bursts / Turbo).

The performance of the Arc A530M should be slightly below the older Arc A550M (more cores but less clock speed).

The chip also integrates two media engines for VP9, AVC, HEVC, and AV1 8k en- and decoding. The 4 display pipes support up to 4x 4k120 HDR via DMI 2.0B or DisplayPort 2.0 10G. 

The A530M is produced in 6nm at TSMC (N6 process) and supports dynamic power share (using Deep Link) with 12th gen Intel CPUs (Alder Lake).