Geekbench is not measuring raw performance in terms of operations per second. It's measuring very specific use cases (their current blurb mentions AI and ML, in the past mentioned synthetic tests to approximate browsers). Because thermal constraints would prevent Apple from competing in a brute force approach, Apple have been more willing to include specialised hardware for tasks like AI/ML as in the A12 CPU. Of course, single core AI/ML perf is a bit of a silly metric but it's one thing geekbench is claiming to measure here that Apple probably wins at. I think in the past encryption/decryption similarly had acceleration sooner on Apple platforms, and Safari is able to make better use of the GPU with less varied hardware to support, and I think real web browsing is another component in geekbench tests.
Operations per second is a notoriously useless measure. Which is why we have higher-level benchmarks like GeekBench that are actually incredibly broad in what they test, performing a lot of real-world type activities in a larger macro-benchmark suite.
The Bionic chips aren't cheating to a win. They win GeekBench, and virtually any other cross-platform activity that you can throw at them. As I mentioned in another post, my iPhone 11 absolutely lays waste to my laptop with an i7-7700HQ processor at the JetStream 2 benchmark. Now this is a JavaScript benchmark that runs on completely different software stacks / OS / etc (my i7 running Windows 10, Chrome 80, etc), but it is layers and layers of dependencies on the performance of the platform. And my big beefy i7 is beaten by a tiny little mobile processor. It is quite remarkable.
It's a blazingly fast little processor. We would probably have seen them use them in other hardware sooner if Apple wasn't always suspicious that Intel was sandbagging in some way and was ready to wow the industry.
The Geekbench score is a pretty useless metric when you have a specific workload in mind. If you are choosing a machine for video editing you're not going to look at the Geekbench score. If you are choosing a machine for compiling code you're not going to look a the Geekbench score. If you need a machine for gaming you're not going to look at the Geekbench score. If you have no specific requirements then you might not even care about having the best performance.
