I think you're misreading the comment you're replying to. Both "more cores is always better" and "more MHz is always better" are myths.

Yup, exactly what I was saying.

They aren't myths. If you take the same chip and clock it higher it's faster. Otherwise nobody would overclock. Second, more cores is better in multi threaded benchmarks, again, looking at the same architecture and generation of chip, just adding more cores. Sure, between 2 different designs, you can't compare core count and clock speed, but maybe M3 is very similar to M2, I don't know. But myth, that's really not correct, either.

That makes less sense because the MHz marketing came before the core count marketing.

I agree with GP that we should rely on real measures like "is it faster", but maybe the goal of exchanging performance cores for efficiency was to decrease power consumption, not be faster?

Probably a balance of both tbh, as it appears to be both faster AND around the same performance per watt.

That's... the same view, just applied to a different metric. Both would be correct.

Your reading comprehension needs work, no wonder you're unconvinced when you don't even understand what is being said.

Yes, but the number of cores in similar cpus do provide a good comparison. For example, with base M2pro at 6 p cores and base M3pro at 5 p cores, one would want ~20% faster cores to compensate for the lack of one core in parallel processing scenarios where things scale well. I don't think M3 brings that. I am waiting to see tests to understand what the new M3s are better for (prob battery life).