Apple leapfrogged the competition by being one of the first customers of TSMC chipmaker’s 5nm chip development and manufacturing process, combining both CPU, RAM, and GPU on a chip for less power consumption overall.
This amazing feat from Apple made their models far superior to old Intel-based Macs, but the new Apple Silicon Macbooks were even competitive on many performance metrics with all but the very top-end AMD and intel CPUs for laptops.
This was in early 2021. Fast-forward to January 2023. AMD and its laptop partners release 7945HX a 7nm CPU with no less than 16 powerful cores (each one significantly more powerful than the 4 fastest 5nm firestorm cores on the M1 8-core model). Not only that, each AMD core is able to also use Hyperthreading to better utilize the CPU for advanced multithreaded software, making the CPU capable of 32 SMT threads!
Mobile CPUs Cinebench multithreaded scores:
Apples M1 (2020) : score 7508 8-threads (4 high performing firestorm Cores + 4 low-power icestorm Cores)
Apple M1 Max (2021) : score 12328 10-threads (8 high performing firestorm Cores + 2 low-power icestorm Cores)
Apples M2 (2022) : score 8619 8-threads (4 high performing firestorm Cores + 4 low-power icestorm Cores)
AMD R9 7940HS (2023) : score 15261 16-threads (8 high performing x86 cores with SMT hyperthreading)
AMD R9 7945HX (2023) : score 24772 32-threads (16 high performing x86 Cores with SMT hyperthreading)
Intel i9-13980HX (2023) : score 26860 (boost mode >32000 ) 32-threads (8 high performing x86 Cores with SMT hyperthreading support, and 16 low-power 1-thread cores)
Apple M2 Max (2023) : score ?????
If Apple shrinks the Apple silicon nodes to 3nm, up-scales the number of performance-cores and increase the TDP of the TSMC chips they should be able to not fall to far behind, and at least in theory reach similar perfromance of Apples currently most powerful $4000 desktop CPU (the M1 Ultra) reaching 23792 on cinebench using 20-threads.
But do we Apple-users really need all this CPU-power? Wouldn’t it be great with just getting a new inexpensive macbook with great battery stamina that is 50%-faster than the 2022 models? Do we really need all that speed?