I did believe those benchmarks. I also knew that sustainable load at those speeds if not throttled down would just melt the thing so yes they were irrelevant.
Maybe in practice at the time, but in hindsight they were actually a valid indication of the true performance capabilities of the architecture. It’s just that a phone has too little thermal capacity to sustain the workload.
Exactly this. If I am shopping now I do not care how particular CPU/architecture evolves in the future. I only care about what it can practically do now and at what price. As it is now M1 has 4 fast cores and not upgradeable maximum 16GB. For many people it would be more than they ever need. Let them be happy. For my purposes I am way more happy with 16 core new AMD coupled with 128GB RAM (my main desktop at the moment). It runs at sustainable 4.2 GHz without any signs of thermal throttling. Cooler is keeping it at 60C.
I saw a paper on (I think?) SMT solvers on iPhone. Turned out to be faster than laptops, I kind of brushed over it as irrelevant at the time.