It's by no means a be all end all "read this number and know everything you need to know" benchmark but it tends to be good enough to give you a decent idea of

It's by no means a be all end all "read this number and know everything you need to know" benchmark but it tends to be good enough to give you a decent idea of how fast a device will be for a typical consumer. If I could pick 1 "generic" benchmark to base things off of I'd pick PassMark though. It tends to agree with Geekbench on Apple Silicon performance but it is a bit more useful when comparing non-typical corner cases (high core count CPUs and the like). Best of all is to look at a full test suite and compare for the specific workload types that matter to you... but that can often be overkill if all you want to know is "yep, Apple is pulling ahead on single thread performance".