Oh, the M1 is a great chip, no question! But I think it’s maybe twice (three times tops?) as good as the competition on a power/perf basis, not the 10x some pe

Oh, the M1 is a great chip, no question! But I think it’s maybe twice (three times tops?) as good as the competition on a power/perf basis, not the 10x some people keep claiming when they compare the 10W claimed by Apple against the 100+W TDP of similarly performing AMD/Intel CPUs. Incidentally, assuming the benchmark they’re running is Geekbench (seems likely at this point), I’ve just run a pass of both CPU & Compute GeekBench5 benchmarks with iotop running in the background & neither did any disk IO of any significance during the run. I think the peak throughput I saw was 150kb/s and that might have been something else on the desktop (I didn’t bother killing anything). Most of the time there was no IO at all. So, if it was GeekBench they were running (seems plausible) then I think we can assume that the SSD is idle & that the Compute benchmark is really a GPU benchmark.