With the Air, the single core performance increase is just under 35% from the last Intel to the first Apple Silicon. The multicore performance increased nearly 250%, due to more cores in Apple Silicon, but before you get too impressed, this is due to the fact that Air is too small to fit as many Intel cores, and does not translate to a machine that is 2-3 times faster because of the importance of single core performance. No other Mac saw as large a performance increase, and generally it's under 35% increase in single core performance and less than 40% increase in multicore performance, and that's because all the other Mac models are large enough to hold an equal number of Intel cores vs Apple Silicon. Air is just too small, so it's still not a generational leap, it's just that more Apple Silicon cores fit in the Air.

You seem to be doing a lot of gymnastics to try to put the chips on a level playing field, but this doesn't make any sense to me at all.

They're fundamentally different architectures, so when the Air experiences the jump in performance that it did, you can't just hand wave that away because "well if Intel had smaller and cooler cores, it wouldn't be as big of a difference".

On the contrary - this is the entire point.

Anecdotally, my 1st gen M1 air is significantly faster at almost every task when compared to my last-gen i9 16" MacBook Pro.

It seems your argument is just that some increments are smaller than other increments? It seems the primary point is that the move to M1 was a much larger jump than most jumps.

Anyone who has been purchasing Apple hardware over the years experienced this in a very practical sense.

The Air does not work as a counter example. It is one model, one single model saw performance increases of 150% in multicore performance, and understanding why is important, because NONE of the other models saw anywhere near that performance increase and much closer to 30%-40% increases across the board. And the level of these increases is slightly more than the increases seen from the second to last gen Intels and the last gen Intels. And those performance increases were slightly more than the third to the last Intels to the second to the last Intels. And the further you go back, the smaller the performance gains are, but fundamentally all of these performance gains are incremental and not abrupt. They follow Apple's trend of increasing performance incrementally at each new release.

@maursault Your argument appears to lack logic and contradicts the evidence presented in the data.

How do you get 35%?

I’m looking at a Geekbench of 1707 for the 2020 M1 and 1113 for the 2020 i7, 1048 for the 2020 i5 and 972 for the 2020 i3 (as shown in the link I provided). That’s an increase of over 50% in single core performance versus the i7, more than 60% versus the i5, and 75% if you compare to the i3.

Am I looking at the wrong machines? How are you comparing?