Geekbench is a somewhat odd collection of benchmarks, I'd be careful reading too much into it.* Furthermore, the site you link to, which is clearly rather gung

Geekbench is a somewhat odd collection of benchmarks, I'd be careful reading too much into it.* Furthermore, the site you link to, which is clearly rather gung-ho about macs, still shows that the ipad was not able to keep up with the intel chips, not even in multithreaded mode, even though the intel has 2 cores to the a10x's 3+3. The ipad beat the MBP on the GPU tests, and I don't think anybody is going to dispute that intel's gpu's are... not exactly record-breaking. Still, you're totally right that apple demonstrated that intel's tech isn't the uniquely fast chip you might think it to be! It's not a small achievement to come this close, especially if the ipad is using less power (which isn't actually clear - battery capacity is roughly similar, at any rate). * The reason I don't like geekbench as a cpu test is that it includes a great many tests like FFTs, gaussian blurs, jpeg with DCTs, image processing, and crypto (even in the noncrypto segment!) etc - i.e. workloads that are very, very vectorizable. The problem with that is that such workloads are really tricky to get right - small differences in code can make considerable difference in perf, and what's right for one CPU isn't for another (notably, geekbench is necessarily running completely different code on these processors). Secondly, those kinds of workloads are very, very amenable to special-purpose instructions, which leads me to the related point that I don't think they're representative of what is typically annoying slow today, and much less what is likely to matter tomorrow: these kind of workloads are either good enough on the CPU as-is, or they're going to be moved to the GPU (or even more specialized hardware), which happens to excel at that.