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Comment by mishafb | Hacker News Reader

These days nanometers are just marketing, they are disconnected from the actual chip density

Well in that case both are made by TSMC so it's comparable. But PassMark results in general are not that great (they use micro benchmarks that may not be representative or are optimised for by vendors).

More importantly, as pointed out by a sibling comment, the AMD CPU in question (like most mobile Intel CPUs) has a "configurable" TDP which is set higher on most products sold. And PassMark doesn't differentiate those and only mention the "official" TDP.

To PassMark credit, they give a distribution of performance scores, just compare the distribution of the Ryzen and the M1 and you'll see (you have to scroll down a bit to see the graphs) :

Ryzen : https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=AMD+Ryzen+7+PRO+585...

M1 : https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Apple+M1+8+Core+320...

In general, you can't compare TDPs even within a brand, they rarely mean what it used to mean a few years back as they "innovate" with various turbo mechanism and other OEM configurable settings.

Both chips are produced at TSMC factories, so both have the same meaning. We do not compare here two different manufacturers.

Yeah, no. The libraries used can and do differ.

Just to give an idea of how crazy it is here is a list of the synopsys TSMC 7nm cell libraries [1] and of course their are other companies that offer additional cell libraries. Also I have no way of proving this, but I wouldn't be at all surprised if both AMD and Apple have their own customizations or additions to whatever cell library they use.

[1] https://www.synopsys.com/dw/emllselector.php?f=TSMC&n=7&s=r3...

When did this happen? I think I've read somewhere that process node size stopped being a meaningful indicator even decades ago.

How so? Architecture?

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