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.