Benchmarks: CPU
A Core i9, on paper, sounds a significant upgrade over Core i7, yet in truth an extra 200MHz is effectively what separates the i9-10980HK from the i7-10875H. Being able to hit 5.3GHz takes the 2021 Aero 15 OLED to the top of the single-threaded tests, but that slight lead is lost in the multi-threaded tests, where harder workloads force the Core i9 chip to scale back to under 3GHz across all cores.
Point is, each laptop on show is outfitted with a mighty fast eight-core processor, but the CPU alone doesn't explain why this year's Aero 15 OLED costs twice as much as last year's model. It is going to be up to the newer GeForce to justify such expense, and running Blender on the GPU provides an early indication of graphics performance. Using the RTX 3080 Laptop chip, we're able to complete the render in an astonishing 61 seconds, the best result yet.