Against LL: M3 has significantly more L1 per core, and I would be shocked if most CPU benchmarks could take advantage/aware of LL's vector units/NPU which it knowingly does on M-Series. Geekbench is a great overall tool for quickly surface level testing things, especially "does MY system perform how it should, compared to other similar/identical systems?". Without per-scenario/workload details (such as given via OpenBenchmark, etc) it is difficult to ensure the individual tests are actually valid. Further, Lunar Lake's per-core memory bandwidth is... not great unless speculative pipelining is really working fully, which is "basically never" when under short-term benchmarks, while M3 has nearly 4x the memory pigeon holes for its speculation.

Another thing is the memory TLB and page size, Outside of OpenBenchmark's database tests, I am unaware of any test/benchmark (not saying they don't exist, just I don't know of them) that take into account the D$ and TLB pressure differences due to a 4kb page size on x64 vs 16kb of the M-series. It is known that increasing page size, merging pages ("HugePages"), etc can greatly increase performance, from databases to gaming the performance gains are often in the 10-25% range... if the code is compatible or compiled for it. By default, any and all code compiled (and thus assumed to be running) on M3's is going to be taking advantage of 16kb page-sizes, while anything on x64 has to specifically be compiled (or modded) and the OS to enable (due to compatibility concerns) HugePages/LargePages.

You also are missing comparisons to even AMD's own modern Zen5 chips, which are a node behind (N4X), that meet-or-beat the M3 within margins of error of single digit %, that we can hand wave as 'competitive enough' and 'competing with decent margins'. AKA 'AMD at least isn't loosing to Apple by decent margins' which is part of the thesis above that I am trying to refute. Intel (assuming we can trust the results, which I hesitate due to a language barrier and unfamiliarity with the tests ran) being close at all within 5-10% is not "being beaten by decent margins". Decent margins is normally, and consistently 10%+. On LL's power usage in those same benchmarks: again they aren't comparing ISO-package, and even if they were that has never been the performance argument. If a vendor wants a super-low-power chip, that is possible (though Intel seemingly has never had a good history at doing so) but often sacrifices higher power and higher-core count designs. LL's actual cores and internal bus are going to be re-used in their 80+ core server Xeon chips. Apple doesn't care and designs for their own max core counts of "maybe twenty?" and live/suffer with that.

In the end, you are still parroting the exact reasons I am so tired of the "b-but Apple chips are so goood!" lines, they are being engineered for entirely different uses from the ground up, more and beyond the differences that ARM vs x64 has alone. AMD at least is nipping at Apple's heals whenever they get a chance on a node even close, and can scale their designs up to 384 threads per socket. Apples designs are good don't get me wrong, and are very interesting, but the gulf between is far less than people keep parroting. Super-low idle power is just not where the money is for AMD, so while they do try (partly due to mobile/hand-helds, partly since low idle power can save power budget when going big) the efforts are not nearly as aggressive as what Apple is doing.