Intel Core i5-11320H vs Apple M3 Pro 11-Core

Intel Core i5-11320H

The Intel Core i5-11320H is a mid range SoC for thin and light gaming laptops and mobile workstations. It is based on the Tiger Lake H35 refresh generation and will be announced in Q3 2021. It integrates four Willow Cove processor cores (8 threads thanks to HyperThreading). The base clock speed depends on the TDP setting and can vary from 2.5 (28 W TDP) to 3.2 GHz (35 W). The boost of a single and two cores under load can reach up to 4.5 GHz. All four cores can reach up to 4.3 GHz. The L3 cache is reduced to 8 MB compared to the 12 MB of the higher end i7 models.

Thanks to the improved clock speeds, the performance gap to the faster i7-11370H should be quite small. The i7 still offers higher single and dual core Turbo speeds and more L3 cache.

The SoC also included the improved Xe graphics card with 96 CUs clocked at up to 1350 MHz.

Furthermore, Tiger Lake SoCs add PCIe 4 support (four lanes), AI hardware acceleration, and the partial integration of Thunderbolt 4/USB 4 and Wi-Fi 6 in the chip.

The chip is produced on the improved 10nm process (called 10nm SuperFin) at Intel, which should be comparable to the 7nm process at TSMC (e.g. Ryzen 4000 series).

All articles on Tiger Lake can be found on our Tiger Lake architecture hub.

Apple M3 Pro 11-Core

The Apple M3 Pro 11 Core is a system on a chip (SoC) from Apple for notebooks that was introduced late 2023. It integrates 11 of the 12 CPU cores with 5 of 6 performance cores with up to 4.06 GHz and 6 efficiency cores with 2.8 GHz.

Compared to the M2 Pro the M3 Pro has been slimmed down somewhat and swaps two performance cores for efficiency cores. This is due to the changed core configuration, as 6 cores are now used per cluster (the M2 Pro and M3 still have 4 cores per cluster). Furthermore, the memory bus has been reduced from 256 bits to 192 bits (150 GB/s vs. 200 GB/s). Thanks to the new architecture and higher clock rates, the new M3 Pro is still slightly faster.

The M3 Pro also integrates a new graphics card with dynamic caching, mesh shading and ray tracing acceleration via hardware. In the entry-level model, only 14 of the chip's 18 cores are used and support up to 3 displays simultaneously (internal and 2 external).

GPU and CPU can jointly access the shared memory on the package (unified memory). This is available in 18 or 36 GB variants and offers 150 GB/s maximum bandwidth (192 bit bus).

The integrated 16-core Neural Engine has also been revised and now offers 18 TOPS peak performance (compared to 15.8 TOPS in the M2 but 35 TOPS in the new A17 Pro). The video engine now also supports AV1 decoding in hardware. H.264, HEVC and ProRes (RAW) can still be decoded and encoded.

Unfortunately, the integrated WLAN only continues to support WiFi 6E (no WiFi 7), unlike the small M3 SoC thunderbolt 4 is also supported (max 40 Gbit/s).

The chip is manufactured in the current 3nm process (N3B) at TSMC and contains 37 billion transistors (-7.5% vs. Apple M2 Pro).