[jkeddo]

One big thing to consider is that this is just the first m1 Max Geekbench score, compared against the world's greatest 11900Ks. Most 11900K's are nowhere near the levels of the top preforming one.

Once Apple starts shipping M1 Max in volume, and as TSMC yields get better, you will see "golden chips" slowly start to score even higher than this one.

[cauk]

Golden chips?

[spacedcowboy]

In every manufacturing process there are always chips that perform better than others. They all reach the "bin" that they're designed for, but the actual design is for higher than that, so that even imperfect chips can perform at the required level.

The corollary of that is that there are some chips that perform better than the design parameters would have you expect, they're easier to overclock and get higher speeds from. These are the "golden" chips.

Having said that, it's not clear to me that the M1* will do that, I don't know if Apple self-tune the chips on boot to extract the best performance, or they just slap in a standard clock-rate and anything that can meet it, does. I'd expect the latter, tbh. It's a lot easier, and it means there's less variation between devices which has lots of knock-on benefits to QA and the company in general, even if it means users can't overclock.

[trenchgun]

There are slight variations in materials, processes, etc.

End result: some chips just end up being better than others.