There's only so much you can do with a 40-year old instruction set. There's certain things neither ARM or Intel can do compared to the M1.

Example: the max number of instruction decoders Intel and AMD can use is 4 and that brings tons of complexity due to x86 instructions ranging in size from 1-15 bytes. There's no way for the processor to know where the instruction boundaries lie except through trial and error essentially.

All ARM instructions are one size, so decoding them and having many instructions in flight at any given time is much easier. The M1 has 8 instruction decoders.

Short answer: the M1 can process twice as many instructions per clock cycle than Intel/AMD processors can.

The M1 and the Zen3 run neck and neck, with the Zen3 being slightly faster in some benchmarks.

But the Zen3 runs at 5 GHz and the M1 runs at 3.2 GHz, meaning if the M1 ran at 5 GHz, it would blow the Zen3 away. And of course, on a performance per watt basis, the M1 is the obvious winner.

This article gets into all the reasons why Intel and AMD are between a rock and a hard place when it comes to competing with the M1:

"Why Is Apple’s M1 Chip So Fast?"—https://debugger.medium.com/why-is-apples-m1-chip-so-fast-32...