My point is it's a collection of benchmarks rather than a single task, and unless I'm missing something, there is no breakdown of each task. intel were caught manipulating benchmarks like these many times by just getting the benchmark company to run the tests more favourable to intel more often. apple have added a lot of on cpu accelerators, we have no idea what geekbench benchmarks are taking advantage of this hardware so how can we tell if its CPU performance or some onboard math or video accelerator giving it the better score.
with tests like pi or prime numbers it's much harder to manipulate, especially if its opensource.
Another way to look at it is apple CPUs are designed for apple products. So rather than add lots of math extensions like x86 done with SSE SSE4 etc, they just added a specific accelerator for their specific formats. so instead of video extensions they just add a full video converter so as long as its apple software and you use those formats it will be faster on the apple computer. they have done this with a lot of functions like storage, video, audio, cameras, cryptography, AI. so this is why im sceptical about performance gains in geekbench because you cannot tell if its raw CPU performance or one of the accelerators doing the work. especially when you look at something like Cinebench, its raw compute and the m3 pro around the same performance as a Intel Core i5-13500H or ryzen 5800H.
Geekbench
has a public methodology (though this is the GB6.0 version) with a breakdown of each task and if any ISA-specific extensions are tapped into:
https://www.geekbench.com/doc/geekbench6-benchmark-internals.pdf
Nothing is Apple-specific and in fact, Geekbench refused to support Apple's older AMX ISA extensions. Geekbench can't tap into accelerators outside the CPU; ISA extensions, yes, accelerators, no, just like virtually every CPU benchmark.
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Unfortunately PiFast and wPrime are Windows only, but
a quick search showed that the M1 / M2 / M3 do well in an open source Pi benchmark.
Apple's silicon does too well across too many domains for it to be any accelerator fluke or "Apple is gaming the benchmark!" Of course, some poor reviewers don't understand what is a CPU benchmark and what is an SoC benchmark, but across virtually all CPU benchmarks, the M1 / M2 / M3 perform exceedingly well and are close to or exceed Intel & AMD in 1T.
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Re: video decoders / encoders:
everyone (AMD, Intel, Qualcomm, Apple) ships HW-accelerated IP for video encode / decode, though. That isn't Apple-specific. PC reviewers can, and
most do, toggle their benchmarks to use the CPU-only whenever some app allows you to choose. There have been a few silly reviews, though, where someone doesn't understand how to use Handbrake.
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Cinebench:
IMO, that is still impressive. You're comparing CPUs with over +50% more power available.
As Cinebench's current version doesn't have many mega-reviews yet, these are all collated:
M3 Pro results & power,
i9-13980HX results,
i7-12700K & 7700X results,
155H results. The i7-14700HX and i5-1235U, you need to use NBC's search bar below the charts to "Add an additional device", as the device reviews don't include newer tests.
I wanted to add more ~30W TDP tests, but Notebookcheck hasn't added many newer laptops yet, either.
| R24 1T | R24 nT |
|---|
| Apple M3 Pro (6+6) - 27W | 143 - 100% | 1059 - 100% |
| Intel i5-1235U (2+8) - 20W PL1 | 93 - 65% | 406 - 38% |
| AMD 7840HS (8+0) - 45W TDP | 104 - 72% | 923 - 87% |
| Intel Core Ultra 7 155H (6+8+2) - 20W TDP | 106 - 74% | 733 - 69% |
| Intel i7-14700HX (8+12) | 101 - 71% | 1003 - 95% |
| AMD Ryzen 7700X (6+0) | 116 - 83% | 1070 - 103% |
| Intel i7-12700K (8+4) | 114 - 81% | 1169 - 112% |
| Intel i9-19380HX (8+16) | 125 - 90% | 1665 - 160% |
At its power level, the M3 Pro is doing
extremely well, IMO.
