Re:Apple's M4 Max chip is the fastest single-core performer ...
by jchw on Saturday November 02, 2024 @10:04AM
(#42026460)
Honestly, I do agree, it is kind of ridiculous that it is fighting neck and neck with relatively overclocked AMD and Intel CPUs. I always do a little bit of overclocking but some of these overclocks are pretty high.
Still, I do think some of Apple's inherent advantages make it less surprising that they're able to win on benchmarks. Again, the process node, the RAM directly on the chip. And hell, they are probably also able to get here because of targeting AArch64 with no 32-bit ARM compatibility.
Either way, Apple appears to be a couple years ahead of the competition right now when it comes to efficient processors, just like they were with the M1.
The M4 core @ 4.5 GHz has a significantly higher ST GB6 performance than Lion Cove @ 5.7 GHz or Zen 5 @ 5.7 GHz (which are almost equal at the same clock frequency, with at most a 2% advantage for Lion Cove).
Having higher GB6 scores should be representative for general-purpose computing, but there are application domains where the performance of the Apple cores has been poor in the past and M4 is unlikely to have changed anything, i.e. the computations with big integer numbers or the array operations done on the CPU cores, not on the AMX/SME accelerators.
Nevertheless, I believe that your point about the existence of higher ST GB6 scores is not weakened by the fact that those CPUs are overclocked.
For a majority of the computer users in the world, the existence of higher ST performance that can be provided by either overclocked Intel/AMD CPUs or by CPUs made by Apple is equally irrelevant, because those users would never choose any of these 2 kinds of CPUs for their work.