https://wccftech.com/why-apple-m1-single-core-comparisons-are-fundamentally-flawed-with-benchmarks/

I have something pretty exciting for our readers today; something that almost everyone appears to have missed in the clamor for Apple M1 benchmark comparisons. What if I told you that pretty much all of the single-core benchmark comparisons between the Apple M1 and modern x86 processors you see online are fundamentally flawed (assuming the intent is to see which core is the fastest)? Because you see, most single "core" benchmarks out there do not fully saturate a modern x86 core - but they likely do saturate the M1.

Our story begins with an industry dominated by x86 processors. Almost all x86 processors on the market today (with the exception of some old families that have the feature deliberately disabled) would utilize an SMT implementation in their architecture. Enthusiasts would know this feature by HyperThreading (in Intel processors) although AMD has their own SMT implementation as well. You see, modern x86 cores are very wide and a single thread in Windows is usually not enough to saturate the core and utilize all of its resources. This is why each core is actually assigned two threads from which they receive their workload. Here is a technical explanation: