| Geekbench is basically trash. People keep using it for comparing Mac performance because many of the things people usually benchmark don't run on Macs. But single-number outputs like that are useless. Is the number ~10% higher because it's consistently ~10% faster at everything, or because it's 100% faster on a minority of things and slower at everything else? The first one is pretty unlikely when comparing processors with different designs, and indeed that isn't it: https://www.phoronix.com/review/apple-m4-intel-amd-linux/4 https://www.phoronix.com/review/apple-m4-intel-amd-linux/5 https://www.phoronix.com/review/apple-m4-intel-amd-linux/6 https://www.phoronix.com/review/apple-m4-intel-amd-linux/7 The CPU in those charts with a similar TDP to the M4 is the Ryzen HX 370. You can see that the M4 is ahead of it in a few of the tests (C-Ray, DuckDB, PyBench, FLAC) but in even more of them the M4 is at the bottom of the stack. (Only a third of those charts are actually performance; each performance chart is followed by two power consumption charts.) And the ~20W TDP is a nice parlor trick (the HX 370 is the only one on the list that competes with it there) but in a desktop CPU that's pretty irrelevant. Whereas if you compare it to the CPUs that can be had for a similar price (e.g. Ryzen 9700X, 65W), it's only ahead in C-Ray and FLAC while losing quite badly in most of the others and subjecting you to unupgradable soldered memory that the PC hardware doesn't. Meanwhile doing ray tracing on a CPU instead of a GPU isn't much fun, and FLAC is an audio codec so a ~10% improvement there is probably not going to be a big part of your day if you're not a full-time sound engineer. So does averaging those kinds of things in to make a single benchmark number make sense? Or should you be looking at the results on applications you actually use? |