Development work? WTF do you think the LLVM sub-benchmark of GB does?
Time to put this argument to bed.
First, regarding the Clang benchmark, do you really honestly think Geekbench has a Clang compiler hidden in their benchmark? No they do not. They would have never made it to the app store if they had. It’s an approximation of a workload. However, lets play that game.
Did you happen to notice the multi-threaded performance for those benchmarks? Development workloads are multithreaded NOT single threaded. Do you know what the largest percentage of Macbooks are used for? Development!
Let’s take a look at the A13 for a moment:
2x2.6 GHz big cores @ 5-6 watts of power. Multiply that by 4 to get an 8 core 8 thread - 20-24 watts Wait! There isn’t any hyperthreading, no DDR4, No PCIE, Actually, come to think of it, that smartphone SoC is missing every single major feature that modern machines have. Before you know it, Apple has blown past a 45 watt TDP.
ARM CPUs, including those from Apple look very attractive until you get into the nitty gritty of it. To scale up any ARM CPU just means you’ll end up with a similar perf/watt to an x86 CPU. AMD and Intel aren’t sandbagging, they have to deal with the laws of physics just like Apple/Intel do.
That isn’t to say that Apple and other CPU/SoC manufacturers aren’t doing a bang up job, but if you think they will somehow have a monstrous price/performance/power advantage over x86, I have a bridge to sell you.