DANIEL LEMIRE BREAKS DOWN HOW APPLE SILICON GOT 52% FASTER IN THREE YEARS, MOSTLY FROM CLOCK SPEED

Summary from the TLDR Hardware newsletter

Comparing base M2 (2022) through M5 (2025) on Geekbench 6, single-core performance rose 52% and multi-core 83%, with most of the single-core gain traced to raw clock speed: the P-core climbed from 3.5GHz to 4.6GHz, a 30% jump that alone explains the bulk of it. Transistor count grew roughly 40% from M2 to M4 (20 billion to 28 billion), spent partly on two extra efficiency cores on the M4 that boost multicore throughput without touching single-core speed, and partly on wider decode, up from 8 to 10 instructions per cycle, ahead of most competitors.