I think people, when assessing the power of the Apple A18 Pro phone chip being used at the heart of the new MacBook Neo, should remember this graph from AnandTech, posted at the time of the Apple M1's debut.

Note the performance trajectory of Intel's top tier consumer CPUs vs. that of Apple's A-series phone chips. In 2020, the Apple A14 Bionic SoC in the iPhone 12 outperformed, in single-core performance, Intel's i9-10900K CPU. That's right. This performance trajectory of Apple's phone chips vs. Intel's mainline CPUs was a major factor in Apple deciding to start rolling their own M-series CPUs for the Mac. (And the M1 grew out of the same A14 SoC shown here.)

This puts into question just how apt a descriptor of performance the term "phone chip" really is, I think.

cc @siracusa

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