Hello, author here! I'm aware that that the Xeon E5-2680 is ancient, which is why I also included comparisons with the Xeon W-3245 that is in the current 2019 Mac Pro, and with the Threadripper 3990X, which came out in February 2020.

Unfortunately I don't exactly have access to piles of fancy server chips sitting around, so I had to make do with just testing against what I have access to, and that's all I had access to. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Yeah, but you don't need to "reach for not just high end desktop chips, but for server-class workstation hardware to really beat the M1 Max". Low-market CPU's for desktop will like the Ryzen 5 3600 (newegg for 240$) surpass it on CPU bench. Likely they also surpass it on on raytracing as well. And chips like the AMD Ryzen 7 4800H, which is a "big laptop" CPU, also beat it. The M1 Pro 10 manages to best that, but not by a huge margin on passmark.

None of them beat an actual, modern, mid-market desktop CPU. And none of those compare to the likes of the threadripper.

The test results are amazing, the exposition here is simply inaccurate. Again, you don't need a "server-class highend workstation" CPU to best the M1 in raw performance. Nothing on the planet beats the m1 in tpd/performance. That's amazing enough on its own.

He also benchmarked it against the Intel Xeon W-3245 which is what that referred to. It's not disingenuous at all: the old Xeon is explicitly called out as old, which is why he compared it to the 2019 Xeon in the Mac Pro as well.

> My two year old intel laptop cpu (i7-9750H) also outperforms the xeon's he's comparing against by almost 40%.

Yeah, but for how long? My laptop has a respectable CPU as well but any kind of sustained load would melt it down if it didn't automatically throttle itself back to 2 GHz and below after like 5 seconds.

These M1 chips somehow manage to have great performance while also keeping temperatures and power draw low. I think this will change everything forever.

> Any kind of sustained load would melt it down if it didn't automatically throttle itself back to 2 GHz and below after like 5 seconds

Bingo

It depends on how the laptop designed to cool it.

Cooling laptops just isn't going to happen. I've never had one with a thermal management system that didn't suck. My current laptop has 3 noisy ridiculously loud fans and it can't cool the processor enough to maintain a sustained load at maximum speed. All I have to do to watch it nearly melt itself down at 93 °C is run make all in some project's directory.

This comment comes off as idingenuous itself. What about the 3245 or the Threadpiper, also mentioned?

The test results are great. But you don't need a highend server CPU to best the m1 inraw performance. Most mid-level (around 300$) desktop cpus will do that just fine. The exposition here is simply... wrong.

The remarkable thing about the m1 is the tpd/performance it gets.

Imagine complaining about the content of an article you obviously didn't read.