You don't care about the generation of HW and nm-size.. but you care enough only to compare single-core performance only?.. the M1 a) costs you more than an old 2018 2700x and b) the 2700x will still beat it for chess-engine benchmarks if you choose to use the full-chip. Per core benches are really moot benchmarks for most engines today that happily does 256 threads if need be.mar wrote: ↑Thu Apr 08, 2021 5:07 pm so - how are they exaggerated? I saw what I saw - my engine runs 1.5+ times faster on M1 (single thread) than on my 2700X and yes it's a desktop CPU and yes I'm talking 15W M1 vs 100W desktop. that's a fact - that M1 is 5nm and my 2700x is 12nm is not my concern.
The only modern chess engine that would be helped by stronger per-core benches are LC0, Allie, etc. which are more GPU than CPU bound. But then the discussion will tilt to having the M1s built-in RAM+GPU compared to a comparable laptop CPU that supports discrete GPU and memory subsystems.
More comparable to M1 in CPU generation, price, and mobility is for example AMD Ryzen 7 PRO 5850U. It's similarly priced, 15W, and beats the M1 hands down in ANY relevant chess-engine-benchmark.