EEMBC is a very poor benchmark for anything but very small embedded workloads (the datasets generally fit in a desktop CPU's L1 cache), but Micro Magic's claims are even more ludicrous. To quote the person in the article (Andy Huang, apparently their advisor):

"Using the EEMBC benchmark, we get 55,000 CoreMarks per Watt. The M1 chip is roughly the equivalent of 10,000 CoreMarks in EEMBC terms; divide this by eight cores and 15W per core, and that is less than 100 CoreMarks per Watt."

Almost every claim in this is wrong. There doesn't seem to be a published score for the M1, but looking at some Intel/AMD CPU scores on the EEMBC website [1] suggests a score of 50K points per core for comparable CPUs like the Ryzen 9 3900X. So the M1 is more likely around 200-300K Coremarks, not 10K. The M1 also consumes around 15W for the entire SoC, not 15W per core. The real Coremarks/watt of the M1 is probably closer to 20K than 100.

Suddenly 55,000 Coremarks per watt for their chip doesn't sound so impressive when you realize the M1 also contains a full LPDDR4X memory controller, GPU, neural net accelerator, etc. and has 10x the IPC even on this extremely simple benchmark...

[1] https://www.eembc.org/coremark/scores.php