>There’s been a lot of criticism about more common benchmark suites such as GeekBench, but frankly I've found these concerns or arguments to be quite unfounded. The only factual differences between workloads in SPEC and workloads in GB5 is that the latter has less outlier tests which are memory-heavy, meaning it’s more of a CPU benchmark whereas SPEC has more tendency towards CPU+DRAM.

https://www.anandtech.com/show/16226/apple-silicon-m1-a14-de...

And yet here we have the M1 MacBook Air apparently beating the M1 MacBook pro, by a large margin.

It's thought that the MBP score is due to it being ran possibly during indexing on setup. The score difference is too big, it's a single sample, and the pro still fries it at single core.

Based on a sample size of 1 or 2, most likely. It could be due to something as stupid as Spotlight running in the background on the MBP but not the Air.

The silicon lottery is still a thing.

I imagine they will eventually have enough chips to start binning for different performance levels like AMD and Intel do.

They are already binning. The air is supposed to be less powerful, with cheaper variants even having one core less.

The benchmark is just ... that accurate.

They are binning for functional GPU cores and allow chips with only 7 functional GPU cores instead of 8 to go into the lower priced Air.

They are not binning for how high the cores will clock, which is just how business is done with Intel and AMD.

It's not measuring sustained performance. The fanless MacBook Air is going to throttle much sooner than a desktop iMac with proper cooling and unlimited power.