My 5950x compiles the Linux kernel 10 seconds faster than a 40 core xeon box, in like 1/10th the power envelope.

The chances of actually getting a only a single core working on something are slim with multitasking, I had to purpose build stuff - hardware and kernel/etc for CPU mining a half decade ago to eliminate thermal and pre-emption on single threaded miners.

Single thread performance has been stagnant forever because with Firefox/chrome and whatever the new "browser app" hotness is this month your going to be using more than 1 core virtually 100% of the time, so why target that. Smaller die features means less tdp which means less throttling which means faster overall user experience.

I'm glad someone is calling out the M1 performance finally.

You actually get better single core performance out of a 5900x than a 5950x. The more cores the AMD CPU has, generally the more they constrain the speed it can perform at on the top end. In this case, the 5950x is 3.5GHz and the 5900x is 3.7GHz. The 5800x is even slightly faster than that, and there's some Geekbench results that show single core performance faster than the score listed here, but at that point the multi-core performance isn't winning anymore.

Also, I'm not sure what's up with Geekbench results on MacOS, but here's a 5950x in an iMac Pro that trounces all the results we've mentioned here somehow.[1]

1: https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/6034871

>that trounces all the results we've mentioned here somehow.[1]

MacOS, being unix based, has a decent thread scheduler - unlike windows 10/11, which is based on windows NT and 32bits, and never cared about anything other than single core performance until very very recently.

If that's true it puts a lot of comparisons into question. That windows multiprocessing isn't as good as MacOS doesn't matter to a lot of people that run neither. There's not a lot of point in using these benchmarks to say something about the hardware if the software above it but below the benchmark can cause it to be off by such a large amount.

Most comparisons have always been questionable. Main reason MacOS gets away with charging so much more for similar hardware and still dominates the productivity market is it squeezes so much more performance (and stability) out of equivalent hardware. Just check the geekbench top multithread scores, windows starts around the 39th _page_ - and thats for windows enterprise.

That's not necessarily true, single core boost on a 5950x is higher than the 5900x (4.9GHz vs 4.8GHz).

That's obviously a Hackintosh or a VM result.

Geekbench score for a 5900x (12 core) against the M1 Max (10 core) score already linked:

https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/compare/10517471?baseli...

They look to be on par to me. Things will be less murky if and when Apple finally scale this thing up to 100+ watt desktop class machines (Mac Pro) and AMD move to the next gen / latest TSMC process.

In my view Intel and AMD have more incentive to regain the performance crown than Apple do at maintaining it. At some point Apple will go back to focusing on others areas in their marketing.

no it doesnt, you must have misread the benchmark scores.

Geekbench.com says m1 max 1700, 5950x 2200