[throwaway2048]

Apple's M1 is a good processor, but the only reason it "smashed past" previous macbook single core results is apple was using older Intel lower powered processors.

It is not twice as fast as even mobile x86 stuff, as much as people seem to want to think otherwise.

[sixstringtheory]

Anecdata of one, but compiling our product at work on my three machines (a 2019 intel macbook pro, a 2020 10 core intel imac and an m1 mac mini), the macbook pro is the slowest, but the imac isn’t that much faster than the mini. it’s something like:

- macbook pro: 9 minutes

- mini: 5 minutes

- imac: 4 minutes

[moreira]

Where the M1 really blows any other CPU away is single-threaded performance; multi-threaded performance is just normal. So it's not surprising that it's not faster than your 10-core iMac when compiling (which I assume is using 100% of every core).

In fact, given that the M1 is an 8-core CPU and your iMac has a 10-core CPU, the fact that they take 5 and 4 minutes respectively to compile seems to indicate that they're fairly similar in multi-threaded performance (and the iMac wins only because it has more cores).