Also, all the top nearly 50 multi-core benchmarks are taken up by Epyc and Xeon chips. For desktop/laptop chips that aren't Threadripper, Apple still leads with the M3 Ultra 32-core in multi-core passmark benchmark. The usual caveats of benchmarks not being representative of any actual workload still apply, of course.
And Apple does lag behind in multi-core benchmarks for laptop chips - The M3 Ultra is not offered in a laptop form-factor, but it does beat every AMD/Intel laptop chip as well in multicore benchmarks.
Obviously it's an Apple-to-Oranges (pardon the pun) comparison since the AMD options don't need to care about the power envelope nearly as much; and the comparison gets more equal when normalizing for Apple's optimized domain (power efficiency), but the high-end AMD laptop chips still edge it out.
But then this turns into some sort of religious war, where people want to assume that their "god" should win at everything. It's not, the Apple chips are great; amazing even, when considering they're powering laptops/phones for 10+ hours at a time in smaller chassis than their competitors. But they still have to give in certain metrics to hit that envelope.
1 - https://thepcbottleneckcalculator.com/cpu-benchmarks-2026/
What does "single core gaming performance" even mean for a CPU that doesn't have an iGPU? How could that not be a category error to compare against Apple Silicon?
I was looking at https://www.cpubenchmark.net/single-thread/
See also:
https://nanoreview.net/en/cpu-list/cinebench-scores
https://browser.geekbench.com/mac-benchmarks vs https://browser.geekbench.com/processor-benchmarks
Just a guess, but I would interpret it to mean how fast the CPU can issue commands to the GPU (which is usually, though not always, done in a single thread). For example, that could be measured by choosing a graphically lightweight game at minimum settings together with the best possible GPU and measuring the framerate. I.e. Making sure the bottleneck is the CPU, how high does the framerate go?
Whether the package includes a GPU or not is irrelevant, because what is being compared is the CPU part of the package, not the GPU. Whether they both happen to live within the same package or even the same die is irrelevant.
The distance was not huge, maybe 3%. You can obviously pick and choose your benchmarks until you find one where "your" CPU happens to be the best.
https://www.cpubenchmark.net/single-thread/
https://browser.geekbench.com/mac-benchmarks vs https://browser.geekbench.com/processor-benchmarks
Apple leads all of these in single core, by a significant margin. Even at geekbench.com (3398 for AMD 9950X3D vs 3235 for the 14900KS vs ~4000 for various Apple chips)
I'm not sure I could find a single core benchmark it would lose no matter how hard I tried...
My personal M1 feels just as fast as the work M4 due to this.
With maximum corporate spyware it consistently takes 1 second to get a visual feedback on Windows.
The cores are. Nothing is beating a M4/M5 on single CPU performance, and per-cycle nothing is even particularly close.
At the whole-chip level, there are bigger devices from the x86 vendors which will pull ahead on parallel benchmarks. And Apple's unfortunate allergy to effective cooling techniques (like, "faster fans move more air") means that they tend to throttle on chip-scale loads[1].
But if you just want to Run One Thing really fast, which even today still correlates better to "machine feels fast" than parallel loads, Apple is the undisputed king.
[1] One of the reasons Geekbench 6, which controversially includes cooling pauses, looks so much better for Apple than version 5 did.
It’s probably the single most common corner to cut in x86 laptops. Manufacturers love to shove hot chips into a chassis too thin for them and then toss in whatever cheap tiny-whiny-fan cooling solution they happen to have on hand. Result: laptop sounds like a jet engine when the CPU is being pushed.
The issue is actually very simple. In order to gain more performance, manufactures like AMD / Intel for a long time have been in a race for the highest frequency but if you have some knowhow in hardware, you know that higher frequency = more power draw the higher you clock.
So you open your MS Paint, and ... your CPU pushes to 5.2Ghz, and it gets fed 15W on a single core. This creates a heat spike in the sensors, and your fans on laptops, all too often are set to react very fast. And VROOOOEEEEM goes your fan as the CPU Temp sensor hits 80C on a single core, just for a second. But wait, your MS Paint is open, and down goes the fan. And repeat, repeat, repeat ...
Notice how Apple focused on running their CPUs no higher then 4.2Ghz or something... So even if their CPU boosts to 100%, that thermal peak will be maybe 7W.
Now combine that with Apple using a much more tolerant fan / temp sensor setup. They say: 100C is perfectly acceptable. So when your CPU boosts, its not dumping 15W, but only 7W. And because the fan reaction threshold is so high, the fans do not react on any Apple product. Unless you run a single or MT process for a LONG time.
And even then, the fans will only ramp up slowly if your 100C has been going on for a few seconds, and while yes, your CPU will be thermal throttling while the fans spin up. But you do not feel this effect.
That is the real magic of Apple. Yes, their CPUs are masterpieces at how they get so much performance from a lower frequency, but the real kicker is their thermal / fan profile design.
The wife has a old Apple clone laptop from 2018. Thing is for 99.9% of the time silent. No fans, nothing. Because Xiaomi used the same tricks on that laptop, allowing it to boost to the max, without triggering the fan ramping. And when it triggers with a long running process, they use a very low fan rpm until it goes way too high. I had laptops with the same CPU from other brands in the same time periode, and they all had annoying fan profiles. That showed me that a lot of Apple magic is good design around the hardware/software/fan.
But ironically, that magic has been forgotten in later models by Xiaomi ... Tsk!
Manufactures think: Its better if millions of people suffer from more noise, then if we need to have a few thousand laptops that die / get damaged, from too much heat. So ramp up the fans!!!
Of course Apple did pick a very good sweet spot favoring a wide core as opposed to a speed daemon more than the competition.
That's true in principle, but IMHO a little too evasive. In point of fact Apple 100% won this round. Their wider architecture is actually faster than the competition in an absolute sense even at the deployed clock rates. There's really no significant market where you'd want to use anything different for CPU compute anywhere. Datacenters would absolutely buy M5 racks if they were offered. M5 efficiency cores are better than Intel's or Zen 5c every time they're measured too.
Just about the only spaces where Apple is behind[1] are die size and packaging: their cores take a little more area per benchmark point, and they're still shipping big single dies. And they finance both of those shortcomings with much higher per-part margins.
Intel and AMD have moved hard into tiled architectures and it seems to be working out for them. I'd expect Apple to do the same soon.
[1] Well, except the big elephant in the room that "CPU Performance Doesn't Matter Much Anymore". Consumer CPUs are fast enough and have been for years now, and the stuff that feels slow is on the GPU or the cloud these days. Apple's in critical danger of being commoditized out of its market space, but then that's true of every premium vendor throughout history.
Early on personally I had doubts they could scale their CPU to high end desktop performance, but obviously it hasn't been an issue.
My nitpick was purely about using clock per cycle as a performance metric, which is as much nonsense as comparing GHz: AFAIK Apple cpus still top at 4.5 GHz, while the AMD/Intel reach 6Ghz, so obviously the architectures are optimized for different target frequencies (which makes sense: the power costs of a high GHz design are astronomical).
And as an microarchitecture nerd I'm definitely interested in how they can implement such a wide architecture, but wide-ness per-se is not a target.
It was a discussion about how the P cores are left ready to speedily respond to input via the E cores satisfying background needs, in this case talking specifically about Apple Silicon because that's the writer's interest. But of course loads of chips have P and E cores, for the same reason.
You are comparing 256 AMD Zen6c Core to What? M4 Max?
When people say CPU they meant CPU Core, And in terms of Raw Speed, Apple CPU holds the fastest single core CPU benchmarks.
https://www.cpubenchmark.net/single-thread/
Where the M5 (non-pro, the one that will be in the next MacBook Air) is on top.
When the M5 multicore scores arrive, the multi-core charts will be interesting.