While true, also keep in mind that the iPad Pro (M4) which has no active cooling, and uses only 1/4th the power ... is still faster (single & multicore) than this 9800X3D - and it's also been on the market for 1/2 year now already.
The M4 Max you can pre-order gets around 26,000 multicore but is significantly more expensive than the 9950X ($569) or 9800X3D ($479). The M4 Max is a $1,200 premium over the M4 on the 14 inch MacBook Pro and a $1,100 premium over the M4 Pro on the 16 inch.
The M4 Max is only available in the MacBook Pro at present. The Mac Mini and iMac will only get the base M4. The Mac Studio is still based on the M2.
This is just a summary of performance and cost. Portability, efficiency, and compatibility factors will weigh everyone's choices.
The Geekbench scores cannot compare laptop CPUs with desktop CPUs, because the tasks that are executed are too short and they do not demonstrate the steady-state throughput of the CPUs. The desktop CPUs are much faster for multithreaded tasks in comparison with laptop/tablet CPUs than it appears in the GB results.
The Apple CPUs have a much better instructions-per-clock-cycle ratio than any other CPUs, and now in M4 they also have a relatively high clock frequency, of at least 4.5 GHz. This allows them to win most single-threaded benchmarks.
However the performance in multi-threaded benchmarks has a very weak dependence on the CPU microarchitecture and it is determined mostly by the manufacturing process used for the CPU.
If we were able to compare Intel, AMD and Apple CPUs with the same number of cores and made with the same TSMC process, their multithreaded performance would be very close at a given power consumption.
The reason is that executing a given benchmark requires a number of logic transitions that is about the same for different microarchitectures, unless some of the design teams have been incompetent. An Apple CPU does more logic transitions per clock cycle, so in single thread it finishes the task faster.
However in multithreaded execution, where the power consumption of the CPU reaches the power limit, the number of logic transitions per second in the same manufacturing process is determined by the power consumption. Therefore the benchmark will be completed in approximately the same number of seconds when the power limits are the same, regardless of the differences in the single-threaded performance.
At equal power, an M4 will have a slightly better MT performance than an Intel or AMD CPU, due to the better manufacturing process, but the difference is too small to make it competitive with a desktop CPU.
Bullshit. What you're talking about is the steady-state of the heatsink, not the steady state of the chip. Intel learned the hard way that a fast CPU core in a phone really does become a fast CPU core in a laptop or desktop when given a better cooling solution.
> However in multithreaded execution, where the power consumption of the CPU reaches the power limit, the number of logic transitions per second in the same manufacturing process is determined by the power consumption. Therefore the benchmark will be completed in approximately the same number of seconds when the power limits are the same, regardless of the differences in the single-threaded performance.
No, microarchitecture really does matter. And so does the macro architecture of AMD's desktop chips that burn a huge amount of power on an inefficient chip to chip interface.
Apple is paying for exclusive access to TSMC's next node. That improves their final products, but doesn't make their architecture inherently better.
I don't mean to take away from how impressive they are.
>You should only care about a set of processors that is available in the market at the same time. The M4 is available now and Zen 6 is not.
I can't buy an M4, it's not available in the market.
Apple goes one step further though: M processors aren't just unavailable to consumers, there's also no way for OEMs to build systems using these chips. In this point they differ significantly from the examples you mentioned. For people that do not want to buy into the Apple ecosystem, M chips are effectively not on the market, and benchmark comparisons to desktop or server CPUs are meaningless.
The second part of your argument is currently correct but that will change shortly. There is no reason to lock into the apple ecosystem. M4 support is underway in Linux though not yet available. You can easily use a Mac mini as a server running Linux.
No, them only being available as part of Apple products and thus not on the CPU market was my original point. I should probably have been more explicit in my original comments. I don't believe I have been moving goalposts, but your interpretation of the point I was trying to make might have changed.
When it was only the iPad with the M4, it was easier to be sympathetic to your cause, since the iPad is totally locked down and isn't a general purpose computing device since it can't run arbitrary code. But now the Mac Mini is available. It is a general purpose computing device, and you can install Firefox and Linux or whatever you want.
It doesn't meet the level of hardware vendor purity you're asking for, sure, but that's a more ideological now that there's a general purpose computer with the M4 for sale. (Just wish it were cheaper.)
And since it just went on sale today, I was highlighting that, since other readers might want to know that they can now get a computer with an M4.
Except the fact that your computer runs more than one thread. Pity that this "single core" performance cannot be utilized at its maximum potential.