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Comment by joas_coder | Hacker News Reader

According to CPUBenchmark.net the M3 Max 16 Core is the fastest single thread cpu with a score of 4,785, followed by the M3 Max 14 Core with a score of 4,771.

Although the numbers above are close, it does not make much sense to me that a chip with more CPUs will be faster on single thread performance than the same chip with less CPUs. But I can be wrong.

Also, according to their list, even the M3 8 Core beats the M4 chips (Pro and Max included). Again on single thread performance. Am I missing something?

Am I missing something or the M3 for single thread performance is faster than the M4?

I can't emphasize enough that I'm only talking about single thread performance here.

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That's far from the only number that looks weird. If this site is legit - a point I'm not conceding - it could be that these numbers are the average of some large number of systems, and the tests are not properly controlled for any of the other factors that might affect performance. Amount of memory, memory speed, single vs dual channel, overclocking, CPU cooler, even ambient temperature could all be having an impact on the score, and certain types of CPU could be more likely to be biased in a particular direction.

It's also possible for some of the CPUs that their sample size is really small - so one or two overclocked or hotboxed systems could completely throw off the result.

Do you know a trustworthy source where I can compare single thread performance of M3s and M4s?

4785 versus 4771 feels like it's within the bounds of run to run variance

Agree! But how about the M3 8 Core (4754) beating the M4 Max 14 Core (4614)? I thought the M4s were faster than the M3s (single core / single thread), but it looks like they will only be faster on multi core / multi thread benchmarks. I would think that the sheer speed of a CPU is the single core / single thread performance number.

You're still only talking about a 3% difference. Outside the margin of error for a properly-controlled test - which I don't think this is - to be sure. But small enough that if I went into the BIOS of your PC while you weren't looking and down-clocked the RAM to achieve the same effect you wouldn't notice unless you ran a benchmark.

The number of cores is irrelevant to the measure of single core performance. It is entirely possible that single core performance is less for many reasons up to and including silicon lottery.

Raw performance is also not the only relevant metric. Given that these results are within run to run variance there are other factors to consider such as power consumption.

So yes, this is not at all a shocking revelation to me.

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