Comment by bigyabai

It's believable. AMD's x86 APUs were basically neck-and-neck with the M1 in performance, and when you normalize for production processes AMD was actually more efficient under load: https://www.notebookcheck.net/M1-vs-R7-4800U_12937_11681.247...

x86 is the minority of the issue compared to securing cutting-edge nodes and optimizing for big.LITTLE. And once you factor in all of the dark ops on Apple Silicon (NPU, anyone?), they've basically butt up against the same wall of wasting transistors on specialized hardware that is obsolete within 3 years of release. Minus the ability to cleanly integrate it with compiler tech for efficiency gains, a-la SSE/AVX.