Their results are invalid because they used Cinebench. Cinebench uses Intel Embree engine which is hand optimized for x86, not ARM instructions. In addition, Cinebench is a terrible general purpose CPU benchmark.[0]
Imagine if you're testing how energy efficient an EV and a gas car is. But you only run the test in the North pole, where the cold will make the EV at least 40% less efficient. And then you make a conclusion based solely on that data for all regions in the world. That's what using Cinebench to compare Apple Silicon and x86 chips is like.
Cinebench/4D does have "hand-optimized" ARM instructions. It would be a disaster for the actual product if it didn't. That's what makes it interesting as a benchmark: that there's a real commercial product behind it and a company interested in making it as efficient as possible for all customer CPUs, not just benchmarking purposes.
Albeit for later releases this is less true since most customers have switched to GPUs...
Cinebench/4D does have "hand-optimized" ARM instructions.
It doesn't. As far as I know, everything is translated from x86 to ARM instructions - not direct ARM optimization.
Cinema4D is a niche software within a niche. Even Cinema4D users don't typically use CPU renderer. They use the GPU renderer.
The reason Cinebench became so popular is because AMD and Intel promote it heavily in their marketing to get nerds to buy high core count CPUs that they don't need.
Imagine if you're testing how energy efficient an EV and a gas car is. But you only run the test in the North pole, where the cold will make the EV at least 40% less efficient. And then you make a conclusion based solely on that data for all regions in the world. That's what using Cinebench to compare Apple Silicon and x86 chips is like.
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/hardware/comments/pitid6/eli5_why_d...