Lacking power? Below buying the very best Intel or AMD CPU which needs a new mainboard and RAM, I seem to never get any PC upgrades in the region of even an M3.
For mobile, this kind of performance is insane. I usually am happy if it is not a netbook CPU, since my 4th gen i5 dualcore+HT is still up to anything I want to do with it.
That’s something that I’m puzzled about. If we take a look at both PC and Mac Geekbench results which use the exact same Intel CPU as a baseline, Macs wipe the floor with any Intel or AMD professor. Am I reading it wrong or?
I am not suggesting that Geekbench is intentionally favoring Apple Silicon. The code the benchmark runs just happens to run better on Apple Silicon. And Geekbench also poorly scales with higher core counts so multicore scores are almost useless.
IMO with benchmarks it's never a good idea to rely on a single score. You should compare many different scores. Preferably with benchmarks that test workloads you will actually make use of.
But even then, what benchmarks contradict it? You’re claiming an inherent bias, but other benchmarks also run just as well on Apple Silicon when normalized for core count. Cinebench, Specs etc…
That sounds about right. Of course depends on the workload, but e.g. when compiling Rust code, having a Apple M-series chip makes a huge difference. That alone would make it hard for me to consider switching to any non-Apple laptop.
From personal experience, I'd also say that there is a noticeable bump in performance between M Max and M Pro chips (= running same workload as colleagues on identical specs apart from the chip), that isn't really apparent in the benchmarks here.
No, the bench results for Apple laptops are accurate (since there is close to no variance in hw config). It is the x64 processors that appear worse than they actually perform.
Might be an issue with the test methodology for x64 processors, eg. cooling and RAM speeds, SSD speeds etc. You should run geekbench on your own machine. C++ and C project compilation benchmarks I ran more or less match what I saw with Geekbench (in terms of %diff).
Basically, what I got is as follows (fully spec'd M4 MBA vs Ryzen 5900X, WSL2):
* for multi-core, my M4 Air is only 25% slower than my Ryzen 5900x desktop
* for single-core, my M4 Air is 0-20% faster than my 5900x
Compared to the M1 Air, it is almost exactly 2x as fast (Apple's claims are true in this regard), has slightly brighter display, and much better speakers. The "2x as fast" is sometimes actually "4x+ as fast" (for some workloads) because you have to take thermal throttling into account.
For mobile, this kind of performance is insane. I usually am happy if it is not a netbook CPU, since my 4th gen i5 dualcore+HT is still up to anything I want to do with it.