Why would you be surprised? Apple's chip design team is the best in the entire industry, funded by a virtually infinite bankroll and with a razor focus on only developing chips for Apple's products; so microcode to drivers can be intimately optimized like a gaming console.

The access to iOS and macOS means that they can profile every single app everyone runs and improve real-world performance, and they do.

If you are a company that supplies anything (software or hardware) to Apple or Amazon, and you are operating on >20% gross margins, Apple and Amazon will destroy you, and destroy your margins. You have to continuously innovate and can't just relax and chill and collect your margins, like Intel has been doing for the past 5 years, milking their advantage that has evaporated.

Other than the modem, I don't think there's a component on the latest iPhones that has more than 20% margins for the supplier. Apple is ruthless. So is Amazon, when it comes to fulfilment.

Just because you have lots of money doesn't mean laws of physics suddenly are out to lunch.

Apple is using the same fabrication process as everyone else in a mature industy. There simply isn't 2x improvement possible unless everyone else was staggeringly inconpetent. Imagine Apple decided to build their own car, and made their own electric motors. Would you believe claims that their motors are 2x as efficient?

Agreed. A lot of people seem to think x86 has some inherent bottleneck that switching to ARM will magically bypass.

Single core performance is currently doubling every five years or so. We’re not about to see it double in the next 24 hours.

I've never understood this argument. For some reason there is this RISC vs CISC war debate but it's not actually based on reality of modern day chip design. The idea is that the decoder is consuming too much power and this design flaw cannot be fixed. Simplifying the decoder reduces the power consumption and therefore allows higher clock frequencies. But when we look at the clock frequencies of ARM and x86 chips we consistently see that x86 chips run at higher frequencies (roughly 4 Ghz for x86 and 2.7 Ghz for ARM). If there is a difference between ARM and x86 chips then it's not in the decoder. The difference must lie in the micro architecture of the chips and therefore RISC vs CISC is no longer relevant because the ISA is by definition not part of the micro architecture.

Apple's ARM chips probably perform much better than reference ARM chips because they are much closer to the micro architecture that Intel uses. But Apple's chips still consume less power than Intel chips used in laptops. The secret sauce is probably the fact that the SoC has cores with different performance and power profiles. Big cores are used for peak performance bursts and lots of small cores for energy efficiency while the device is waiting for user input.

I think Geekbench is measuring peak performance and not sustained performance but the numbers are probably correct. Making a representative comparison between mobile devices and desktops isn't possible because their different thermal profiles but it's highly likely that Apple will go for a passively cooled design if they can.

x64 chips can run at 4-5 GHz because these are desktop parts that can drop 10+ W sustained on a single core if need be. Power-frequency scaling tells us that of course this is very inefficient (perf/W), but efficiency isn't all, sometimes you just gotta go fast.

> double in the next 24 hours

there is a time-honored way to do exactly that.

Constrain the comparison.

"Double the performance" (of $899 to $901 laptops with 2560x1440 resolution)

"Twice as fast" (as all laptops with thunderbolt 3 and no sd card reader)

That's a fair comparison though, if you're a Mac user and this machine is twice as fast and gets 5 more hours on a charge, you'll probably be persuaded to upgrade. If you aren't a Mac user I don't think they need to convince you now, they need to convince the developers and artists to stay on the platform.