Are the numbers from your own testing? Could you provide them? For Apple Silicon, the only older CPUs with fewer efficiency cores than the 4 E-core M4 Pro is the M1 Pro/Max which only had 2 E-cores but increased the frequency of those E-cores to compensate. The M3 Pro meanwhile had 6 E-cores. Doing a quick comparison on cpu monkey between the M3 Pro/Max and M4 Pro does indeed show the M3 catching up to the M4 a little (about 10%). However, even the single threaded test the older CPU improves about 6-7% on the newer test relative to the newer CPU and the number of E-cores does not appear to matter - also I wasn't able to recapitulate your extreme Intel results for the 14900K/9900K*:
| ST Ratio CB 26 | ST Ratio CB 24 | MT Ratio CB 26 | MT Ratio CB 24 |
| M4 Pro (14) / M3 Max (14) | 1.18 | 1.25 | 1.15 | 1.26 |
| M4 Pro (14) / M3 Pro (11) | 1.19 | 1.27 | 1.78 | 1.98 |
| i9 14900K/9900K | 1.7 | 1.8 | 3.25 | 3.4 |
| ST Ratio CB 24/26 | MT Ratio CB 24/26 |
| M4 Pro (14) / M3 Max (14) | 1.06 | 1.1 |
| M4 Pro (14) / M3 Pro (11) | 1.07 | 1.11 |
| i9 14900K/9900K | 1.06 | 1.05 |
As always there is a few % variation expected due to noise and slight differences in performances between chips of the same type.
Apple M4 Pro (14-CPU 20-GPU) vs Apple M3 Pro (11-CPU 14-GPU) – Benchmarks, Specifications & Comparison. Which CPU is faster, more efficient, and better for gaming & productivity?
www.cpu-monkey.com
Apple M4 Pro (14-CPU 20-GPU) vs Apple M3 Max (14-CPU 30-GPU) – Benchmarks, Specifications & Comparison. Which CPU is faster, more efficient, and better for gaming & productivity?
www.cpu-monkey.com
Intel Core i9-9900K vs Intel Core i9-14900K – Benchmarks, Specifications & Comparison. Which CPU is faster, more efficient, and better for gaming & productivity?
www.cpu-monkey.com
*For the 14700K, it may be an issue with that chip in particular (which is very strange):
Intel Core i9-14900K vs Intel Core i7-14700K – Benchmarks, Specifications & Comparison. Which CPU is faster, more efficient, and better for gaming & productivity?
www.cpu-monkey.com
And whatever that something is, it should have nothing to do with E-cores as the 14900K has more (16 vs 12). Of course it is also possible that it is CPU Monkey's 14900K result that is flawed. CPU monkey has a lot of flawed data on it - I did my best to check what I could (the Mac data seems to be okay above, though I saw other questionable Mac data that I did not include). So if you could supply your data that would be really good. The 285K seems to more or less recapitulate the results from above though again the 14900K seems to catch up to it by about 10% and 9900K catches up to it by about 16% in the newer test.
I'm not sure where CPU-monkey sourced their data from, but another source of user generated data is here:
Maxon hat überraschend Cinebench 2026 veröffentlicht. Die Community weiß, was das bedeutet: Community-Benchmark-Test!
www.computerbase.de
Though for the PC-users many of these are likely overclocked variants making comparisons difficult.
While on one hand your assertion that older CPUs catch up to newer ones in the newer test seems to be true, it seems to be by a small amount, not a large one - provided the data . Still interesting. Could be that the new test is hitting the FP vector units harder and if those have changed by a smaller amount between the M3 and M4, they'll perform slightly more similarly. I'd have to check other benchmarks to confirm.
EDIT: for what it is worth the ST & MT ratio for the M4/M3 of GB 6's Ray tracer is 1.16 and 1.76 (huge variability in those measures though) and the Blender 4.5 CPU (tricky because they don't explicitly split the Macs by CPU core count for some odd reason in open-data, so you have to look at the distribution and pick the part of the histogram applying to your core count) for M4 Pro (14)/M3 Pro (11) is 1.8 (MT only) so both Blender and GB 6 RT subtest are very similar to CB 26's ratios rather than CB 24's.
