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.

AMD64 (x86-64) runs x86-32 at near-native speed, but it isn't x86-32. As someone who was an early adopter of Linux/AMD64 I know first-hand backwards compatibility is very important. Apple knows, hence Rosetta. Every time they switch architecture, they invest into backwards compatibility. As a counter-example, Itanium wasn't good with backwards compatibility.

What was the Linux landscape like for AMD64 early adopters?

Debian was quick with adopting it (they've always been very cross-platform focused), in contrast to say Windows (which took a lot longer). On Linux, a lot worked, but not everything. Slowly but surely more got ported to AMD64. What didn't work? Especially pre-compiled proprietary software was not available (IIRC Nvidia drivers? At the very least games). You had to have x86-32 userland installed. Which adds up to higher diskspace requirement. Nowadays, diskspace requirement is negligible, and x86-32 userland is less relevant (on AMD64/x86-64). I would assume the 4 GB limit eventually made games swap to AMD64 as well.

Back then, Intel was still betting on Itanium. It was a time when AMD was ahead of Intel. Wintel lasted longer, and its only since the smartphone revolution they got caught up. In hindsight, even a Windows computer on Intel gave a user more freedom than the locked down stuff on say iOS. OTOH, sometimes user freedom is a bad thing, arguably if the user isn't technically inclined or if you can sell a locked down platform like PlayStation or Xbox for relatively cheap (kind of like the printer business).

I'm sure other people can add to this as well. :-)