News Apple M3 Leads in PassMark's Single-Thread CPU Benchmark, But There is a Catch

[Admin]

Apple's M3 Pro is Ahead of Intel's Core i9-14900KF in PassMark single-thread CPU benchmark, but gets destroyed in multi-threaded workloads.

Apple M3 Leads in PassMark's Single-Thread CPU Benchmark, But There is a Catch : Read more

 

[Alvar "Miles" Udell]

Question: Why does this article exist? There's already a TH article on an M3 based Macbook Pro (which is sadly deficient in the software test department) and a TG article on the M3 iMac (which again is sofware deficient, only including Geekbench and Handbrake), and Passmark is as irrelevant test as ADIA64's CPU benchmarks (which nobody pays attention to) or CPU-Z's CPU benchmark (which nobody pays attention to), or userbenchmark (which lies and nobody cares about).

Apple 16-inch MacBook Pro (Late 2023) Review: M3 Max Domination

The MacBook Pro gains a new color and an impressively powerful new M3 Max chip.

www.tomshardware.com

Apple iMac M3 review: The best iMac yet

Apple's M3 chip makes the 24-inch iMac better than ever, but iMac M1 owners won't need to race out and upgrade

www.tomsguide.com

 

[Amdlova]

People who compare mac with other hardware have in the playlist "Gillette - Short, Short Man"

 

[bit_user]

Apple's M3 Pro features an eight-wide execution ..., while Intel's Core i9-14900KF boasts a six-wide execution

This is only the rate at which instructions are dispatched by the decoders. The actual amount of concurrency is usually higher. Another good metric to look at is how many instructions can be retired per cycle.

It's not all about width, either. Apple's cores also feature deeper reorder buffers (640 entries, in the M1) than Intel (512 entries, in Golden Cove) or AMD (384 entries, in Zen 4).

 

[bit_user]

Question: Why does this article exist?

It's news. The benchmark result wasn't known by the aforementioned review.

There's already a TH article on an M3 based Macbook Pro (which is sadly deficient in the software test department)

So, we can't have additional news coverage of a product, after it's been reviewed? I wouldn't like that.

Passmark is as irrelevant test as ADIA64's CPU benchmarks (which nobody pays attention to) or CPU-Z's CPU benchmark (which nobody pays attention to), or userbenchmark (which lies and nobody cares about).

If you have information on the quality of Passmark and how it does or doesn't correlate with application performance, I'd be interested in seeing it.

Regardless, I think it's interesting to see a case where the M3 Pro can overcome it's 33% clockspeed deficit to slightly edge out the latest & greatest incarnation of Golden Cove. Nobody is making you read the article (or comment on it).

I like coverage of advancements in CPUs (among other things). I think it's interesting to follow Apple's progress, even though I'm not a Mac user, because it can tell us certain things about ARM, TSMC N3B, what we might reasonably expect from Qualcomm's upcoming laptop SoCs, etc.

 

[JeffreyP55]

Apple's M3 Pro is Ahead of Intel's Core i9-14900KF in PassMark single-thread CPU benchmark, but gets destroyed in multi-threaded workloads.

Apple M3 Leads in PassMark's Single-Thread CPU Benchmark, But There is a Catch : Read more

No apple anything since my workshop in 1994. Believe it was an Motorola 68030 CX.
I did love my Amiga's. Had many at home and at work.

 

[JeffreyP55]

No apple anything since my workshop in 1994. Believe it was an Motorola 68030 CX.
I did love my Amiga's. Had many at home and at work. Apples are niche computers. Apples are best suited for A/V applications.

 

[Alvar "Miles" Udell]

It's news. The benchmark result wasn't known by the aforementioned review.

Except it was. Senior Editor Brandon Hill could have seen the result if he ran the Passmark software for his article.

So, we can't have additional news coverage of a product, after it's been reviewed?

Keyword being "news". Just because there's a benchmarking program that generates a number doesn't mean it's news and needs to be included in any test, much less its own article. Now if the article were about Blender, Final Cut Pro, or other such software then that's noteworthy news. The PugetBench PhotoShop test (as run by TG's editor in chief on the M2 and two competitor Windows machines) is equally valid, as well as gaming tasks.

If you have information on the quality of Passmark and how it does or doesn't correlate with application performance, I'd be interested in seeing it.

Are you saying Passmark is completely reliable and should be included in every article going forward? I don't think you are, considering TH doesn't do it on any CPU or GPU test, nor does Techpowerup, Techspot, or any other reputable tech site, because it's just a program that generates a number that doesn't necessarily reflect real world usage and results, no more than 3DMark or PCMark does.

Using the Passmark numbers, the M3 Max is 34% faster than the M2 Max, yet in the more realistic Handbrake test it was only 26% faster than the M2 Max, a significant difference considering the M3 Max has 25% more cores. The M3 Max scored 41% higher in the Passmark test than the 13700H used in the review article, yet again in handbrake test it was 51% faster.

 

[bit_user]

Except it was. Senior Editor Brandon Hill could have seen the result if he ran the Passmark software for his article.

That's a different request. You could've commented on that review, requesting to run that benchmark.

Keyword being "news". Just because there's a benchmarking program that generates a number doesn't mean it's news

IMO, it is when a new CPU is able to overcome a 33% clockspeed deficit to pull out a single-threaded win. That definitely ranks it as newsworthy.

Now if the article were about Blender, Final Cut Pro, or other such software then that's noteworthy news.

Well, again, it's right in the headline that it's not one of those. So, if you don't care about things other than application benchmarks, then you can simply skip past it to articles that do interest you.

For instance, I have no interest in 3D printing. So, what do I do when I see an article about 3D printing on this site? That's right - I skip past it and look for other articles that do interest me. I never once complained about the site's 3D printing coverage, though.

Are you saying Passmark is completely reliable and should be included in every article going forward?

I'm not the one issuing the complaint. If your complaint is that it's irrelevant, then I would hope you have some data to support that complaint.

it's just a program that generates a number that doesn't necessarily reflect real world usage and results, no more than 3DMark or PCMark does.

I don't know that, and apparently neither do you.

Using the Passmark numbers, the M3 Max is 34% faster than the M2 Max, yet in the more realistic Handbrake test it was only 26% faster than the M2 Max, a significant difference considering the M3 Max has 25% more cores.

The M3 Max has a 12 + 4 configuration (total: 16), while the M2 Max has a 8 + 4 configuration (total: 12). By my math, that's 33.3% more total cores, while actually being 50% more P-cores. The reason Handbrake scales worse than that could be that it's memory bottlenecked (the memory bandwidth reportedly did not increase) or that its scalability is somewhat algorithmically constrained.

 

[gg83]

It's news. The benchmark result wasn't known by the aforementioned review.


So, we can't have additional news coverage of a product, after it's been reviewed? I wouldn't like that.


If you have information on the quality of Passmark and how it does or doesn't correlate with application performance, I'd be interested in seeing it.

Regardless, I think it's interesting to see a case where the M3 Pro can overcome it's 33% clockspeed deficit to slightly edge out the latest & greatest incarnation of Golden Cove. Nobody is making you read the article (or comment on it).

I like coverage of advancements in CPUs (among other things). I think it's interesting to follow Apple's progress, even though I'm not a Mac user, because it can tell us certain things about ARM, TSMC N3B, what we might reasonably expect from Qualcomm's upcoming laptop SoCs, etc.

Especially with the lower power consumption. Do you think x86 will ever win at the low power window?