It's not just about coprocessors. If one CPU has a set of SIMD instructions that double performance on that benchmark or more, that creates a large outlier that significantly changes the average.

Apple Silicon also has more memory bandwidth the primary purpose of which is to feed the GPU because most CPU workloads don't care about that, but if you average in the occasional ones that does then you get more outliers.

Which is why the thing that matters is how it performs on the thing you actually want to run on it, not how it performs in aggregate on a bunch of other applications you don't use.

> The max power on Intel/AMD CPUs is only there to get the CPU "performance crown".

It's mostly not. Its real purpose is to improve performance on threaded workloads.

Multi-core CPUs work like this: At the max boost a single core might use, say, 50 watts. So if you have 8 cores and wanted to run them all full out, you'd need a 400 watt power budget, which is a little nuts. It's not even worth it. Because you only have to clock them a little lower, say 4GHz instead of 5, to cut the power consumption more than in half, and then you get a TDP of e.g. 100W. Still not nothing but much more reasonable. You can also cut the clock speed even more and get the power consumption all the way down to 15W, but then you're down to 2GHz on threaded workloads and sacrificing quite a bit of multi-thread performance.

So they're not just trying to eek out a couple of percent, even though that's all you get from single thread improvement, because a single core was already near or at its limit. Whereas 8 cores at 4GHz will be legitimately twice as fast as the same cores at 2GHz. But they'll also use more than twice as much power. Which matters in a laptop but not so much in a desktop.

Of course, the thing that works even better is to have 16 cores or more that are clocked a little lower, which improves performance and performance per watt. The performance per watt of the 96-core Threadrippers are astonishingly good -- even though they're 360W. But that also requires more silicon, so those ones are the expensive ones.

Because you're comparing a 16-core CPU to an 8-core CPU on threaded workloads, which as mentioned is where the multi-threaded workloads will favor the one with more cores on both performance and performance per watt. But why not compare it to the Ryzen that also has 16 cores, like the 7945HX3D? Because then the Ryzen is generally faster on threaded workloads, even though the TDP is still 55W -- and even though it's on TSMC 5nm instead of 3nm.

I compiled a few previously. Sorry for the formatting:

ASUS ROG Zephyrus G16 (2024)

Processor: Intel Core Ultra 9 185

Memory: 32GB

Cargo Build: 31.85 seconds

Cargo Build --Release: 1 minute 4 seconds

ASUS ROG Zephyrus G14 (2024)

Processor: AMD Ryzen 8945HS / Radeon 780M

Memory: 32GB

Cargo Build: 29.48 seconds

Cargo Build --Release: 34.78 seconds

ASUS ROG Strix Scar 18 (2024)

Processor: Intel Core i9 14900HX

Memory: 64GB

Cargo Build: 21.27 seconds

Cargo Build --Release: 28.69 seconds

Apple MacBook Pro (M3 Pro 11 core)

Processor: M3 Pro 11 core

Cargo Build: 13.70 seconds

Cargo Build --Release: 21.65 seconds

Apple MacBook Pro 16 (M3 Max)

Processor: M3 Max

Cargo Build: 12.70 seconds

Cargo Build --Release: 15.90 seconds

Firefox Mobile build:

M1 Air: 95 seconds AMD 5900hx: 138 seconds Source: https://youtu.be/QSPFx9R99-o?si=oG_nuV4oiMxjv4F-&t=505

Javascript builds

Here, Alex compares the M1 Air running Parallels emulating Linux vs native Linux on AMD Zen2 mobile. The M1 is still significantly faster. https://youtu.be/tgS1P5bP7dA?si=Xz2JQmgoYp3IQGCX&t=183

Docker builds

Here, Alex runs Docker ARM64 vs AMD x86 images and the M1 Air built the image 2x faster than an AMD Zen2 mobile. https://youtu.be/sWav0WuNMNs?si=IgxeMoJqpQaZv2nc&t=366

Anyways, Alex has a ton more videos on coding performance between Apple, Intel and AMD.

Lastly, this is not M1 vs Zen2 but it's M2 vs Zen4.

LLVM build test

M2 Max: 377 seconds Ryzen 9 7940S: 826 seconds

Ah right; that's confusing! Seems that the AMD and Intel chips are much faster though, consistent with other benchmarks.

Speed vs. $ is of course a different story than pure speed; kinda hard to capture in a number I guess.

Most Go projects compile more than fast enough even on my 7 year old i5, although there are exceptions (mostly crummy hyper-overengineered projects).

It the end, what matters is real-world performance and different workloads have different bottlenecks. For people who use Cinema 4D, Cinebench is the most accurate measurement of hardware capabilities they can get. It's very hard to generalize what will matter for the vast majority of people. I find it's best to look at benchmarks for the same applications or similar workloads to what you'll be doing. Single score benchmark like Geekbench are fun and quick way to get some general idea about CPU capabilities, but most of the time they don't match specifics of real-world workloads.

Here's a content creation benchmark (note that for some tasks a GPU is also used):

https://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/articles/mac-vs-pc-for-con...