Depends. If the iPhone 14 has faster ST speeds than the M1, and you're doing a short, pure ST task, then the iPhone 14 could actually be faster.
But isn't the M1 Ultra, like, 32 cores? It's way faster than the iPhone 13! (Maybe the same on 1 core, though.)
This doesn't make sense. You can argue that the Apple wants to keep M1's clock speed within the sweet spot of TSMC's 5nm but you can't argue that M1 can't go higher in clock speed if Apple wants to. Yes, there will be diminishing returns because clock speed is not linear with performance. I'm guessing Apple can boost the clock speed to 4ghz+ if they decide to throw out the perf/watt advantage and probably approach 2000 points in Geekbench5.
Why? Their current offerings outperform all previous Macs and that’s all they need to do. The next Apple Silicon processors will be faster than the current ones. Some non-Apple processors will be faster, most will be slower, but Apple makes the only ones that run macOS so it doesn’t matter.
It just goes to show that single core performance is pretty irrelevant in a normal computing environment. I have no idea why some people think it's so important.
The people who really care about performance are rarely "Mac users". They are more likely to be people who happen to be using a Mac for the moment, because it's the best available option. If another platform is consistently better for a while, they can switch to it. If they prefer macOS, they can usually continue running the frontend on a cheaper Mac while offloading the computation to another device.
...for maybe a few minutes/hours at best and the iPhone will throttle down very quickly.
Apple has lost and will continue to lose to other hardware manufacturers on raw performance due to the flexibility of non-Apple platforms. Anyone right now that REQUIRES the utmost in raw performance over all else are not using macOS by default.
Being competitive does not mean being the best on any single metric. It means offering good trade-offs that beat the competition in some niches. If you want to be competitive, you can't ignore easy gains, because such mentality leads to mediocrity. If the M1 can be clocked higher but Apple chooses not to, even in situations where it's not constrained by heat and power, it's a sign that Apple is no longer interested in producing competitive hardware, and the future of Macs looks uncertain. If the M1 just doesn't run reliably much above 3.26 GHz, we can still assume that Apple is trying to make the best hardware it can.
I fully agree.
In order to do this on, let's say the Mac Studio SoC, Apple would have to do extra work testing, validating, and binning chips for higher frequencies. In addition, they'd probably have to make some changes to MacOS specifically to handle boosting in various situations. For example, no boosting if Low Power mode is on.
