Though Blender may have an optimization for avx512 but not for SME or Neon.
But the vast majority will use GPUs to do rendering for Blender.
Try SPEC or its close consumer counterpart, Geekbench.
As an anecdote, all my Python and Node.js applications run faster on Apple Silicon than Zen4. Even my multithread Go apps seem to run better on Apple Silicon.
On Passmark Apple CPUs are pretty far down the list.
On Geekbench I gave up after scrolling a few pages.
And "run faster on Apple Silicon than Zen4" means nothing. On the low end you have fairly cheap Ryzen 3 laptop chips, and on the high end you have Threadripper behemoths.
I would stick to SPEC and Geekbench.
Even Cinebench 2024 isn't too bad nowadays though R23 was quite poor in correlation.
In general, not only are Apple Silicon CPUs faster than AMD consumer CPUs, but they're 2-4x more power efficient as well.
What you want to do is look at the benchmarks for the thing you're actually using it for.
> they're 2-4x more power efficient as well.
This is generally untrue, people come to this conclusion by comparing mobile CPUs with desktop CPUs. CPU power consumption is non-linear with performance, so a large power budget lets you eek out a tiny bit more margin. For example, compare the 65W 5700X with the 105W 5800X. The 40 extra watts buys you around 2% more single thread performance, not because the 5700X has a more efficient design -- they're the exact same CPU with a different power cap. It's because turning up the clock speed a tiny bit uses a lot more power, but desktop CPUs do it anyway, because they don't have any such thing as battery life and people want the extra tiny bit more. Or the CPU simply won't clock any higher and doesn't even hit the rated TDP on single-threaded workloads.
The extra power will buy you a lot more on multi-threaded workloads, because then you get linear performance improvement with more power by adding more cores. But that's where the high core count CPUs will mop the floor with everything else -- while achieving higher performance per watt, because the individual cores are clocked lower and use less power.
The problem with Geekbench is it's trying to average the scores from many different benchmarks, but then if some of them are outliers (e.g. one CPU has hardware acceleration or some other unusual aptitude for that specific workload), it gets an outsized score which is then averaged in and skews the result even if it doesn't generalize.
It looks though as if AMD/Intel feel threatened by Snapdragon though - we'll see what AMD Strix / Halo brings for the first meaningful x86 mobile processor in years (or Luna Lake).
If you downclock that AMD chip, it does get more efficient, but also loses by even larger margins.
I will repeat:
"On Geekbench I gave up after scrolling a few pages."
SPEC doesn't seem to have easily browsable results, but we can find the Cinebench 2024 ones easy and guess what? Apple isn't at the top. Not even close: https://www.cgdirector.com/cinebench-2024-scores/
For Apple you need to go to https://browser.geekbench.com/mac-benchmarks
Then compare numbers by hand I assume.
Though what I would love is compile-time vs. $ (as mentioned, I'm a software developer). The 7950x is $500 and a very fast SSD is $400, fast 64gb is $200, very good board is $400 so I get a very fast dev machine for ~$1700.
Note: M3 Max is a 40w CPU maximum, while 7950x is a 230w CPU maximum. The stated 170w max is usually deceptive from AMD.
Source for 7950x power consumption: https://www.anandtech.com/show/17641/lighter-touch-cpu-power....
Note that the M3 Max leads in ST in Cinebench 2024 and 2-3x better in perf/watt. It does lose in MT in Cinebench 2024 but wins in GB6 MT.
Cinebench is usually x86 favored as it favors AVX over NEON as well as having extremely long dependency chains, bottlenecked by caches and partly memory. This is why you get a huge SMT yield from it and why it scales very highly if you throw lots of "weak" cores at it.
This is why Cinebench is a poor CPU benchmark in general as the vast majority of applications do not behave like Cinebench.
Geekbench and SPEC are more predictive of CPU speed.
And the argument is, you can't use Blender to compare CPU performance because of that?
"Even my multithread Go apps seem to run better on Apple Silicon."
As a Go developer, I'd love to hear your story: How much faster does your Apple Silicon compile compare to a Zen4 (e.g. the 7950x?)? For example 100k lines of Go code.
I might switch back to Apple again (used Apple for 20+ years), if it's faster at compilation speed.
In multithreaded workloads, 2 of their current e-cores are roughly equivalent to 1 p-core, so that would represent the equivalent of 4 extra p-cores.
Good ol, compare a $400 piece of equipment with a $3000 piece of equipment. I wonder what will win. (unironically, most of the time, the $3000 piece of equipment doesnt win)
M2 Ultra 233.9 Klines/sec
7950x 230.3 Klines/sec
14900K 215.3 Klines/sec
M3 Max 196.5 Klines/sec