They're also comparing arm to x86. Both can do exceptionally well in specific category. I still remember how disappointed I was initially in M chips because of advertisement like "FASTEST CHIP THERE IS, BEATS ALL INTELS", but then I try to play the only cross platform game I know (Minecraft) and it plays worse than on a decade+ older Intel CPU.

The benchmark itself measures burst compute.

For any sort of sustained workload it's nowhere near laptops, let alone near desktops.

The whole post, and especially the title and image, are misleading.

Agreed. The migration to apple silicon should not have worked. There were too many things to go wrong. Yet it worked and worked well.

When you combine a company like apples reputation in tech with such and astonishing outcome, it’s understandable nobody can believe them.

No iCrap gets the hate well deserved. They torpedo their own products.

More cats in my dwarf fortress are never wasted.

Honestly, DF was the last time i thought about single core performance.

On the iPhone, sure, but it would be equally wasted on Android phones because who needs this much performance in a phone anyway. However, I expect them to also use it in next year's Macbook Neo, which is a surprisingly capable laptop for its price with even the A18 Pro chip. It also bodes well for the next generation of their M series chips if the A20 Pro is this fast... and there are TONS of people using Macs for real work. Code compilation in particular got super fast with the M1 Pro and I believe it's great for creative applications too, though I haven't really used those much myself. Creatives types gravitated towards MacOS even before Apple Silicon, especially video editors because of Final Cut Pro.

Linux is inevitable

Sometimes companies build product to get high scores, rather than to work well in real settings.

Apple has done a remarkable job with their silicon though.

I got an used M1 2020 MacBook Air (base model, no upgrades) back in 2023 and that thing is still going strong. Doesn’t feel slow at all. Not even slightly.

They’re the first to get the fastest chips, so saying their chips are the fastest is… misleading? But also “of course” it’s true?

I’m confused.

I don’t think anybody was misled into thinking it meant this chip would always be the fastest on the market.

Okay, but that Intel CPU was part of the first family of CPUs on Intel's equivalent node (18A) too. If nothing else, it serves as an interesting Intel vs TSMC lithography comparison. Which one would expect TSMC to win anyway, but at least now we have numbers.

And yet, it can't (be made to) run a full desktop OS

I'm not disagreeing with the rest of your post, but you do realize the MacBook Neo running the desktop macOS is using the A18 Pro, right? The A20 is an iteration on the same design and will likely end up in the next MacBook Neo.

Not that crazy to beat a desktop CPU in specific category like this. This article went off the deep end when they made the comparison to the Huawei CPU. If you actually put one of these in a phone and spent any amount of time getting the kind of performance they're claiming it would almost immediately thermal throttle or cook itself. These comparisons are pointless.