As my muscular colleague Jeremy pointed out already, Apple has been making gains. It's doubled the single-core performance of its in-house chips, the M-series, in five years, and while the predicted single-core score in Geekbench 6 for the new M5 was 4100 (based on the M5 iPad Pro), in my actual testing of a 14-inch M5 MacBook Pro that figure is 4310.
You know what else scores 4310 points in that test? Nothing. The Ryzen 7 9800X3D? 3332. The Core i9 14900KS? 3238. The Core Ultra 9 285K? 3214. When Apple claimed the ARM-based M5 had the best single-core performance in the world, it sure meant it.
