Not too long ago we reported about how the Apple M1 processor was nipping at the heels of powerful desktop processors such as the Rocket Lake Intel Core i7-11700K when it came to important single-thread processing performance. While its benchmark results left the Apple Silicon in third position in PassMark’s chart for desktop CPUs, behind the aforementioned Core i7 chip and the Intel Core i9-11900K, it seems the single-thread rating for the M1 is high enough to give it first place in the chart for laptop processors.

The Apple M1 currently has a single-thread rating of 3,541 points, which is a little lower than the 3,543 points it had a couple of weeks ago, although the average result seems to be leveling out at this mark (42 samples tested at the time of writing; low margin for error). The Apple Silicon beats out some of AMD’s best here: The Ryzen 9 5900HX scores 3,299 points (15 samples; medium margin for error) and the Ryzen 9 5980HS manages 3,425 points (one sample; high margin for error). The typical TDP measured for the M1 was a very power-friendly 15.1 W compared to the 35-45 W for the Ryzen 5000 parts.

This is definitely not just saying that the Apple Silicon is better than the highly praised Ryzen 9 5000 series processors, as clearly both of the AMD parts can obliterate the M1 rival in cross-platform rating where a “composite” of tests are utilized to stress the processor. The biggest takeaway to be had from this performance is that Apple’s first attempt to take on AMD and Intel in this arena resulted in the first-generation ARM-based M1 SoC smashing benchmarks left, right, and center. It’s no surprise that fans are already getting extremely excited about the performance potential of an M1X/M2 successor.

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