Apple Silicon M1 chip in MacBook Air outperforms high-end 16-inch MacBook Pro

AMD's Zen 3 (Ryzen 5xxx series) are beating the Apple M1 in single core score: https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/singlecore

As another datapoint Ian (of Anandtech) estimated that the M1 would need to be clocked at 3.25Ghz to match Zen 3, and these systems are showing a 3.2Ghz clock: https://twitter.com/IanCutress/status/1326516048309460992

No, they aren't. All of the top results have crazy overclocking and liquid cooling. You need to look the numbers here: https://browser.geekbench.com/processor-benchmarks. Top end Zen 3 is slightly lower than M1.

Not exactly.

You can check the clock speeds: https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/4620493.gb5

Up to 5050MHz is stock behavior for the 5950X and it's using standard DDR4 3200 memory.

Yet it still makes it very clear: a properly implemented ARM core can easily bury an X86 of equivalent size because of inherent advantage of not having to pay interest on 40 years of technical debt in the ISA.

Because 5 nm better than 7 nm. That's about it. AMD Zen will be on par with Apple Silicone when they'll use 5 nm process.

Actually i'd bet that you're both wrong. What M1 does well isn't that "ARM-is-better" or that they're using a smaller process (even if both factors probably plays into helping the M1 chips edge a few %).

Rather i suspect that the main benefit that M1 has in many real world benchmarks is that it has on-chip memory, cache-miss latency is a huge cost in the real world (why games has drifted towards DoD internals), so sidestepping that issue to a large extent by integrating memory on-die gives it a great boost.

I'm betting once they've reverse engineered the M1 perf, we will see multi-GB caches on AMD/Intel chips within 4 years.