I constantly get between 154 and 156 ns/url when running on an M2 Air 2022 while using asahi linux instead of MacOs. 22 Celsius according to smartmontools :)

So seems a good part of the speed-up comes from using the Linux kernel, which tbh. doesn't really surprise me. It's hard to match the engineering amount and quality getting poured into it (well at least the core stuff, some niche driver will be a mess like everywhere). The remainder then comes from modern x86_64/amd64 CPU combined with DDR5 beating the M2, well at least in this micro benchmark.

One of the comments on the article notes a 7950x doing "time/url=109ns"

so I tossed it on my 5950x and it reports "ns/url=148.994" which is about right from what I understand (zen4 gets a nice ~30% bump on a number of Linux benchmarks over zen3), here its 35% with only a 16% clock advantage.

Which is about the diff between the M2 and my old 5950X in a generation older process/etc.

So, yah current M2 slower than previous gen Intel and AMD both in this benchmark.