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.

> 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.

Well, no point in arguing here. You may be right, but the machines will be in the hands of users next week. It would be stupid for Apple to make those claims if they weren't true. We'll see soon enough.

Assuming the claims are true, we shouldn't forget that Intel per core performance improvements have been incremental at best for several years. They've really run into some major problems with their fab process development in recent years. TSMC (Apple Silicon foundry) is well ahead. It has been kind of hard to watch since that has historically been such a strength for Intel. They're a strong company, they'll get it together.

Apple is the company that was cherry picking benchmarks for YEARS as PowerPC was being crushed by Intel. Apple has been making false or at least misleading claims forever.

Not all of them, mind you, but you need a boulder of salt.