I suspect PC's containing AMD, and maybe even Intel, chips will be crushing Apple in terms of performance a few years from now, even with the legacy that is the x86 ISA.
Just because Apple currently have a (for the sake of argument) 20 watt part, that can outperform an Intel 45 watt part, it doesn't mean this advantage is inherent to ARM or sustainable once the tech cycle evens out.
The bottleneck right now for essentially all chip performance in mobile devices is heat. If you bypass the power throttling and fan control on my 10th gen 6 core Dell XPS 9500 and let it slurp 80-90 watts (and it will), and sit at 100 degrees centigrade (and it will) it will handily beat an M1 multithreaded score in Cinebench.
FWIW I largely agree with you. Zen is still competitive at ~7nm/12nm with separate corelets, so if they can match 5nm on a single chip, things will be back to normal.
M1 has 16B transistors on 1 "chip", a 3950X has fewer than 10B across 3. What else would you expect, for now?
The same advantage applies to Apple as well. In fact, the only difference between the different performances in the different devices Apple has added the M1 to is their cooling capabilities.
> Just because Apple currently have a (for the sake of argument) 20 watt part, that can outperform an Intel 45 watt part
Single core performance beats even Intel’s highest TDP processors, I’m pretty sure AMD’s too, in real world workloads. Yes, AMD and Intel still have an edge when you get above 8 cores, but that’s kinda to be expected, no?
Just because Apple currently have a (for the sake of argument) 20 watt part, that can outperform an Intel 45 watt part, it doesn't mean this advantage is inherent to ARM or sustainable once the tech cycle evens out.
The bottleneck right now for essentially all chip performance in mobile devices is heat. If you bypass the power throttling and fan control on my 10th gen 6 core Dell XPS 9500 and let it slurp 80-90 watts (and it will), and sit at 100 degrees centigrade (and it will) it will handily beat an M1 multithreaded score in Cinebench.