Apple's Shifting Differentiation

I accept that the performance of Apple's chips have increased rapidly in the last few years, but the benchmarks that they are using to compare to various x86 CPUs makes me suspicious that they are cherry-picking benchmarks and aren't telling the whole story (either in the Stratechery article or the Anandtech they got the figures from).

Why am I suspicious? THERE IS ABSOLUTELY NO WAY THAT A 5W PART LIKE THE A14 IS FASTER THAN A 100W PART LIKE THE i9-10900k! I understand they are comparing single threaded speed. I'll accept that the A14 is more power efficient. I'll acknowledge that Intel has been struggling lately. But to imply that a low power mobile is straight up faster than a high power chip in any category makes me extremely suspicious that the benchmark isn't actually measuring speed (maybe it's normalizing by power draw), or that the ARM and x86 versions of the benchmark have different reference values (like a 1000 score for an ARM is not the same speed of calculation as a 1000 score on x86). It just can't be true that the tablet with a total price of $1k can hang with a $500 CPU that has practically unlimited size, weight and power compared to the tablet, and when the total price to make it comparable in features (motherboard, power supply, monitor, etc) makes the desktop system more expensive.

Regardless of whether it's an intentional trick or an oversight, I don't think that the benchmark showing the mobile chip is better than a desktop chip in RAW PERFORMANCE is true. And that means that a lot of the conclusions that they draw from the benchmark aren't true. There is no way that the A14 (nor the M1) is going to be faster in any raw performance category than a latest generation and top-spec desktop system.

Anandtech says you are wrong:

https://www.anandtech.com/show/16226/apple-silicon-m1-a14-de...

I read that article too and mentioned it in my first sentence. That's the article that Stratechery pulled their figures from. The validity of that article and those benchmarks is what I'm doubting.

Will the new Macbooks with M1 chips compare favorably against Intel laptops with low power and fanless designs? Yeah.

Is the existing A14 chip faster than than a 10900k (even in single threaded performance)? No way. There is something in the benchmark that is messed up to the point where you can't compare them.