Apple M1 vs Intel Core i3-10110Y

Apple M1

The Apple M1 is a System on a Chip (SoC) from Apple that is found in the late 2020 MacBook Air, MacBook Pro 13, and Mac Mini. It offers 8 cores divided in four performance cores and four power-efficiency cores. The big cores offer 192 KB instruction cache, 128 KB data cache, and 12 MB shared L2 cache. According to Apple the performance of these cores should be better than anything on the market (in late 2020). The four efficiency cores are a lot smaller and offer only 128 KB instruction cache, 64 KB data cache, and 4 MB shared cache. The efficiency cores (E cluster) clock with 600 - 2064 MHz, the performance cores (P cluster) with 600 - 3204 MHz.

The M1 is available in two TDP variants, a passive cooled 10 Watt variant for the MacBook Air and an active cooled faster variant for the MacBook Pro 13 and Mac Mini. Those should offer a better-sustained performance according to Apple.

The integrated graphics card in the M1 offers 8 cores (7 cores in the entry MacBook Air) and a peak performance of 2.6 teraflops. Apple claims that it is faster than any other iGPU at the time of announcement.

Furthermore, the SoC integrates a fast 16 core neural engine with a peak performance of 11 TOPS (for AI hardware acceleration), a secure enclave (e.g., for encryption), a unified memory architecture, Thunderbolt / USB 4 controller, an ISP, and media de- and encoders.

The Apple M1 includes 16 billion transistors (up from the 10 billion of the A12Z Bionic and therefore double the amount of a Tiger Lake-U chip like the i7-1185G7) and is manufactured in 5nm at TSMC.

Intel Core i3-10110Y

The Intel Core i3-10110Y is an extremely power efficient dual-core SoC for small laptops and tablets that was announced in August 2019. The faster models, like the Core i5-10310Y offer two additional cores however.

Performance

While we have not tested a single system built around the 10110Y as of August 2023, we have tested at least one laptop utilizing the 10100Y, an insignificantly slower chip (Amber Lake, 2 cores, 4 threads, up to 3.9 GHz.) Based on that, expect the 10110Y to be noticeably faster than the AMD 3050e. Performance of this kind is totally sufficient for basic day-to-day activities, as of late 2022.

Your mileage may vary depending on how high the CPU power limits are.

The integrated graphics adapter however is still the same as in the previous generations. It should be still called Intel UHD Graphics 615 and runs at 300 - 1000 MHz in the i3. Furthermore, the SoC integrates a VP9 and H.265 de- and encoder.

The TDP is specified at 7 Watts but can be varied from 5.5 to 9 Watt from the manufacturer (cTDP up/down) resulting in different performance (especially Turbo durations). Interestingly, the faster Core i5-10210Y with two more cores can be configured to lower 4.5 Watt.