I understand your skepticism, however I would like to point out the following points:
- All machines running Sonoma have consistent results regardless of the clock value reported by Geekbench
- Only some tests report exaggeratedly better values, if the difference between Sequoia and Sonoma was due to the different clock all tests should report scaled values (reduced for Sonoma)
As the weeks go by we will have more data with machines with the same amount of RAM, at the moment many of those using Sequoia are 16 GB configurations.
A first hypothesis is that they have improved the ML framework in some scenarios or that they have changed how the kernel manages clock power scenarios. To confirm this, it would be necessary to match the powermetric data during the bench.
I have performed some of those done on Sonoma personally and they give the same results regardless of whether they are performed in battery or wall plug mode