This article is... misguided. They argue that we should be benchmarking saturated single-core performance, but then show in their chosen benchmarks that the M1

This article is... misguided. They argue that we should be benchmarking saturated single-core performance, but then show in their chosen benchmarks that the M1 is very competitive, benchmarking just below an i9 9880and above a Ryzen 7 4750. That's a super-fast chip! No excuses like "oh it's Apple's first CPU" are needed - it's right up there. And in real world usage it's kind of a useless thing to benchmark. See their note on how they had to wrestle with our Cinebench R23 program to get it to accept the load (threads locked to 2, affinity needed to be set after initiating the run but before the benchmark actually started and needed to be reapplied after the first pass) and a cleaner execution would almost certainly be welcome. It would also allow us to test cores working at their full potential. It kind of shows how these micro-benchmarks aren't very reflective of real-world use.