I don’t understand those benchmarks.

According to geekbench 7800x3d is 2400 single core, 15500 multicore. M4 pro is 3350 single core and 24750 multicore. Yet when I convert video using libsvtav1 with ffmpeg I’m getting noticeably faster performance on the desktop. And that’s with mbp, which doesn’t thermally throttle within 15 seconds.

Is it the 96mb cache? Avx-512? Are benchmarks bullshit when comparing different architectures?

Remember all those years when people claimed Apple chips were "cheating" on benchmarks because they had crypto instructions that x86 lacked?

Apple chips don't have AVX-512.

They do have media engines (that don't support AV1 encode), so if you switch to H.265, it will pull way ahead.

Fast video encode was how AMD fans were coping during bulldozer era

Probably AVX-512. AFAIK Apple CPUs are still using ARM NEON instructions with 128-wide SIMD registers. I guess they are banking on you using the GPU if you want to parallelize those kinds of workload.

Just want to add apart from all the other comments. SVT was brought by Intel and spent years to make it extremely well tuned for x86. While not the same for ARM and not even for Apple.

Another point is that the multicore part uses all core including E-Core. On AMD the multicore are all the same. Meaning for some benchmarks this will flavour Apple more.

Again there is nothing that stop people from optimising it for ARM Mac. The problem is the usage of it is so small it probably doesn't make sense to focus on it. SVT took a really long time for it to reach quality parity with AOM's AV1 encoder and later exceed it.

Judging by my PCs (M4 Max Mac Studio; 2990WX desktop PC), Geekbench might flatter the Apple chips for multicore a bit I think:

Geekbench 7 results:

* AMD 2990WX: 1384 (single), 13052 (multi) (https://browser.geekbench.com/v7/cpu/181239)

* Apple M4 Max: 3552 (single), 29863 (multi) (https://browser.geekbench.com/v7/cpu/390256)

For parallelisable stuff that can occupy all cores for an extended period, the 2990WX typically takes about ~1.2x as long to do the same work/does ~0.83x the work per unit time, assuming code compiled with clang or gcc. Which isn't really coming across in the numbers here.

CPUMark is a bit better:

* AMD 2990WX: 2282 (single), 32040 (multi) (https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=AMD+Ryzen+Threadrip...)

* Apple M4 Max: 4590 (single), 43911 (multi) (https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Apple+M4+Max+16+Cor...)

I haven't spent much time timing single core stuff, except - regarding clang, which looks like it contributes to the Geekbench 7 score, I did some measurements a few months ago suggesting that clang compiles for x64 more slowly than for ARM, all else being as equal as I could be bothered to try to make it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46938682 - and the single threaded test runs I did of my code suggest that the Geekbench 7 single core might be about right?

(Whether the clang timing discrepancy is actually relevant to Geekbench, I've no idea, but I thought it interesting anyway.)

If you need a benchmark that makes the PC look massively faster than the Mac, I'm sure those are available too.

Which version of svt-av1 are you using? Neon optimisations were added quite recently in svt-av1, and are still a bit incomplete, so it might make a difference.

I think software with a strong focus on SIMD really favours x86 over Apple, since AVX2 support was pretty uniform and AVX-512 (except Intel's fiasco) has been supported for a while, while the post-NEON landscape is strange in ARM country.

From what I've been able to gather, Apple only supports SME and the small "streaming" part of SVE2 required by SME since the M4. Which seems to be mostly useless for video encoding (I only see NEON/SVE in https://gitlab.com/AOMediaCodec/SVT-AV1/-/tree/master/Source... or https://github.com/Multicorewareinc/x265/tree/master/source/...) it's basically a GEMM engine.

So basically, video encoding is a bad show for Apple who seem to be saying "use crappy hardware encoding and buy amd64 if you need more".

Very hard to find benchmark data. Found https://openbenchmarking.org/vs/Processor/Apple+M4+Pro,AMD+R... that shows a good x265 performance at 1080p but not 4K. Guess the wider SIMD units matter more there.

sounds like it's the software

> Are benchmarks bullshit when comparing different architectures?

Bingo, each CPU is too unique with its own strengths and weaknesses to make broad statements, marketing picks up what they like and ignore rest