Seems like a strange test then..
Can anyone speak to performance regarding programming?
My 2017 macbook pro is good enough for a lot of things (running java locally, node with nodemon), but slows down for anything native app (xcode) related and running a Docker container with >1GB memory. That's where I'd love to have some improvement
It becomes an entirely different machine. It would not only run/compile your projects much faster, but also literally will have twice to thrice the battery life, and never ever makes noise or get hot. I would only recommend at least a 512GB storage though.
I used to passionately HATE using Macs pre-Apple Silicon era and work 24x7 with Linux at that time, but today I doubt if I will ever use anything other than a Macbook for all my needs. The only reason is Apple Silicon
I really have to say after moving to a M3 Macbook from Intel jesus its smooth, and the battery feels like it never goes down.
I regret waiting for M2 Pro and wasted so much time working on a slow 2017 MacBook Pro.
We already have popular benchmarks like Geekbench that include real world workloads borrowed from popular open source software.
For instance, Geekbench includes (among others) a subtest that compiles an open source Lua interpreter using Clang, and another that uses Google's PDFium to render PDF files.
https://www.geekbench.com/doc/geekbench6-benchmark-internals...
But Xcode's issues are Xcode, not the processor. It will still hang the main thread whenever it wants, just for a bit less time, and your Swift builds will be faster, even if it still doesn't scale linearly with core count.