At passmark, anyway, in a chart that seems to have some rather questionable orderings to it. Like the Ryzen 5900 is according to that AMD's fastest single core performance CPU. But that's certainly not the case as it's just a power-restricted & clock-restricted version of the 5900X, and the 5950X has then an even higher clock ceiling.

Similarly on the Intel side they have the 11900 ranked higher than the 11900K. Which again, there's no way that's true since the 11900K is literally an 11900 with a higher power limit & higher turbo frequency. And then the 11900KF, which is just an 11900K but with the iGPU disabled, is then somehow a lot faster than both?

Actual binnings & achievable frequencies vary, of course, but these orderings aren't passing a sniff test, either.

https://www.anandtech.com/bench/product/2687?vs=2673, https://www.anandtech.com/bench/product/2687?vs=2637, and https://www.anandtech.com/bench/product/2687?vs=2787 are better comparison points here. The M1's single-core performance is of course very strong, but I'm not sure why you're surprised that it's "still" the fastest single-core CPU since these CPUs are all the same generation. There hasn't really been anything newer.

In fairness though, that first link you posted had the M1 beating the 5950X in geekbench 5 single threaded, so that confirms the Passmark result under certain workloads.

In any event, you'll notice M1 achieves an extremely competitive level of performance with a peak power of 22% of that used by the Ryzen 5950X and 10.5% of the 11900K. That's crazy!

In terms of efficiency there really is no comparison the M1 is a remarkable product.

We'll have to see how the M1X/M2 goes, but given what we've seen so far, we should see some stellar results from an M series chip designed for a workstation class laptop.

At peak power the M1 is also struggling to achieve 1/2 the performance of the 5950x, if that. The peak power draw is for the multi threaded workloads, where the m1's 4+4 obviously loses badly to the all the big 16c/32t 5950x

Put another way, the M1 achieves half the multithreaded performance of the 5950x while using less than a quarter of the energy. That's pretty impressive.

We'll see how they scale up, with the new MacBook Pros.

> Put another way, the M1 achieves half the multithreaded performance of the 5950x while using less than a quarter of the energy. That's pretty impressive.

That isn't impressive, no. Power scales non-linearly with clock speeds (and thus performance across a particular CPU design). Compare a 3700x vs. a 3800x for example: https://www.anandtech.com/bench/product/2665?vs=2613 - Huge increase in power draw, barely any performance increase.

You'd have to compare at equivalent power levels to draw a meaningful conclusion like that. Especially since the 5950X is paying power for things the M1 just doesn't have at all, like the large amount of PCI-E lanes. But otherwise for a wall-powered system quadrupling the power for doubling the performance is a quite straightforward "yes please!" tradeoff to be made. Often the gains are much smaller than that.

Of course the M1 also isn't designed to excel at heavily multithreaded workloads having "only" 4 big CPU cores, so it's an unfair fight in that direction as well.