[saltcured]

I confess to not really pay attention to the Apple ecosystem. Does anyone know enough about these benchmarks and chips to really know what is going on here? Is this straight up a difference in conventional superscalar/multicore throughput and efficiency?

Or are is there an aspect of Apple to non-Apple comparison here with the compiler, OS, and library ecosystem? I.e. do any of the benchmark calculations get executed off CPU in the GPU or other "matrix" coprocessing units in the Apple SoC? I am only interested in comparing CPU to CPU or GPU to GPU, but would want to exclude software-based differences like different compilers or support libraries.

[giantrobot]

The M1 has a lot of ALUs, an 8-wide instruction decoder, and a huge reorder buffer. It can decode and execute a lot of instructions on every clock and plenty of space to execute them in an advantageous order. Ignoring power draw, Intel and AMD beat the Mx then they hit higher clock speeds, the Mx top out at 3GHz, and/or pack in more P-cores.