I know it's basically nitpicking competing luxury sports cars at this point, but I am very bothered that existing benchmarks for the M3 show single core perf that is approximately 70% of M4 single core perf.
I feel like I should be able to spend all my money to both get the fastest single core performance AND all the cores and available memory, but Apple has decided that we need to downgrade to "go wide". Annoying.
> both get the fastest single core performance AND all the cores
I'm a major Apple skeptic myself, but hasn't there always been a tradeoff between "fastest single core" vs "lots of cores" (and thus best multicore)?
For instance, I remember when you could buy an iMac with an i9 or whatever, with a higher clock speed and faster single core, or you could buy an iMac Pro with a Xeon with more cores, but the iMac (non-Pro) would beat it in a single core benchmark. Note: Though I used Macs as the example due to the simple product lines, I thought this was pretty much universal among all modern computers.
> hasn't there always been a tradeoff between "fastest single core" vs "lots of cores" (and thus best multicore)?
Not in the Apple Silicon line. The M2 Ultra has the same single core performance as the M2 Max and Pro. No benchmarks for the M3 Ultra yet but I'm guessing the same vs M3 Max and Pro.
I think the traditional reason for this is that other chips like to use complex scheduling logic to have more logical cores than physical cores. This costs single threaded speed but allows you to run more threads faster.
I feel like I should be able to spend all my money to both get the fastest single core performance AND all the cores and available memory, but Apple has decided that we need to downgrade to "go wide". Annoying.