Qualcomm chips are not that far behind Apple's, and Microsoft has Windows on ARM ready for a while now. Those performance advantage won't be there for long.
I think the bigger question is what does this spell for x86-64?
I think the bigger question is what does this spell for x86-64?
I also have my doubts, but would be great for the market. (New Exynos 2100 supposedly also being up there.)
So Qualcomm won't be quite so far behind Apple, but it's still pretty significant.
If we'll just look at geekbench's single core bench, I'm sure Apple will still lead. (And overall likely still produce the better chips.)
Not much?
People are acting like M1 destroys x86, but as AnandTech showed in the recent benchmark, M1 is trading blows with Zen 3 in single thread performance while having much larger core and process advantage (5nm vs. 7nm) thus being actually more expensive to produce.
Are there any workloads that requires or perform better with x86?
The difference might be way smaller or non-existent once we see some comparisons with latest AMD offerings (especially when we have also CPUs with comparable process).
The M1 isn't a tiny power-sipping mobile part - it sucks power down just like AMD's 15W TDP CPUs do. The efficiency gains Apple are getting here are likely to be the result of several factors, only one of which are the CPU cores themselves.
Single core performance does not differ much between mobile and desktop CPUs these days.
You also can't compare manufacturing cost and retail cost. But given AMD cores are both smaller and manufactured on older process, it's probably safe to assume AMD ones are cheaper to manufacture.