I mean, this is a review of the server grade parts. Apple is not exactly selling m chips to hyperscalers right?

Different story when you're talking about the context of a desktop or mobile.

The same graph has a bar for the Ryzen 9 9950X, though.

Ryzen 9950X is basically the same as an Epyc 4565P, except you can buy the Ryzen in a retail box.

1. Different market

2. Can't run Linux on that M5/M6 can we?

1. so is Ryzen 9 9950X

1. 9950X isn't on the chart.

The 9950X3D2 was already tested. And was included as comparison point with the fastest possible version of its predecessor (Zen 5).

Some evidence that contextless numbers are meaningless is that your source, David Huang, does include the 9950X but in his results it scores much higher than everything on C&C's chart too (7.25/11.4)

Regular Ryzen parts are still reasonably relevant for server use! They support ECC, so there's nothing immediately disqualifying them - see the rebranded "EPYC" 4005 series, for example.

A company like Hetzner isn't going to care an awful lot whether they deploy one big SP5 server or four small AM5 ones for the VM instances they rent out: the only thing that matters is TCO per performance.

Want to stick four NVMe SSDs, a 25Gbit NIC, 256GB of ECC RAM, and some OOB module on a Ryzen board? No problem whatsoever. Want to do the same with an Apple CPU? Ehhh, that's going to be slightly more challenging...

Linux is now (barely) working on M5/M6.

if you're interested in a fair comparison here's one https://openbenchmarking.org/test/pts/stockfish

Interesting, but seems to lack single-core benchmarks.

it's not year 2006 anymore

I’m sorry, I wasn’t aware that Amdahl’s law has been cancelled. I will brush up on my computing theory.

Workloads with legitimate serialization dependencies rather than just bad code are pretty rare. Of course, there is still a lot of bad code out there, but it's not Amdahl's law stopping them from doing better.

So this benchmark lists the following:

> AMD Ryzen 9 9950X 16-Core 63rd 4 40132379 +/- 2530724

> Apple M5 Pro 52nd 5 22108587 +/- 260160

I have absolutely no idea what this is benchmarking or how, but is there any reason not to just read this as the "consumer/low core ryzen" is twice as fast as the m5 pro?

> I have absolutely no idea what this is benchmarking or how

It's the best chess engine used by millions of people and part of SPEC2026, natively compiled

Stockfish parallelizes well and makes heavy use of vector operations, and the Zen5 core has AVX-512 with 2x 512bit EU per core and 16 cores, while the Apple still only uses 128-bit wide SIMD, with the 6 M5 "Super" cores having 4x128 EUs and the 12 "Performance" cores only having 2x128 EUs.

The M5 Pro is doing shockingly well given the massive disparity in execution resources. But still, it's optimized for web/desktop-like loads, you shouldn't really run heavy number crunching on that CPU.

Is there any sane way to generalize these results?

I don't think so. The workloads are simply too different to generalize.

They also mention using SSE/AVX on x86 and NEON on ARM, but there's zero mention of SVE, SME, or AMX which makes me wonder if they aren't compiling with those options (if so, it would be a serious disadvantage).

Apple cores do not implement SVE, SME is not suitable for Stockfish (it is optimized for matrix-matric with large batch size, stockfish is all matrix-vector with batch size of 1), and AMX has the same problem.

You don't get good performance out of this kind of code by just compiling with different options, the compute kernels must be tuned to fit the architecture, and nothing on the M-series but NEON fits the bill.

The single-threaded results of the Apple cores are excellent, but the multi-threaded results per socket of a Zen 6 absolutely wipe out any Apple CPU.

The Apple CPUs may be great for a personal computer, but they are not competitive with a server CPU.

Moreover, the SPEC floating-point results are not really representative for the floating-point performance of Zen 5 and Zen 6 that can be reached with optimized AVX-512 programs, which is much greater.

Apple could absolutely make a server CPU using their E-cores that would wipe the floor with Zen6 in both perf and perf/watt. Apple isn't in the server hardware business though which would make it a pointless piece of engineering.

Sure