People should stop comparing Apple Silicon to Intel and start comparing it to AMD.
Intel is not the leader for 5+ years now.
Comparing to Intel is like comparing to PPC MacBooks - meaningless.
The only way to get an M1 is to buy a Mac anyways.
Unless/until you see a mass exodus of people from x86 based OSes the comparisons don't matter.
Sure, new Macs will be super fast, and that in itself will result in some conversions, but there are plenty of other factors that would keep people from switching to Mac.
When you'll be buying a new laptop, you won't be choosing between a 2018 MacBook and a 2021 MacBook, but between 2021 MacBook and offerings from Lenovo, Dell, Microsoft and others.
If you are upgrading, OS inertia may prevent you from choosing a machine that doesn't run the OS you're currently on. So a lot of Windows users may not even consider a Mac, and vice versa.
So yes, you can compare to the current gen and would be choosing between that.
I suspect you will be able to for another year or so. See comment from me elsewhere on this thread for my reasoning.
And as a friend keeps reminding me, this is their cheapest entry level processor :)
aarch64 allows some tricks that are much harder to pull off on amd64.
https://www.anandtech.com/show/16252/mac-mini-apple-m1-teste...
The single-core benchmarks I saw put the M1 against CPUs with amd64 cores running SMT (which is fair - SMT extracts about 20% of extra parallelism of an amd64 workload, something the M1 does using a humongous reorder buffer on a single thread) with the AMD (and latest Intel) parts showing a slight advantage.
They do so, however, at a much higher TDP which, if my own computers (all but the server under the desk) are any indication, will cause the x86's to throttle down in a couple seconds while the M1 will continue at full steam.
They also have a lot more cores.
Per high-performance core, M1 macs are tied or less efficient depending on the workload.
That's not what the benchmarks I see say. AMD's chips with 8 amd64 cores beat the M1, which has 4 big cores and 4 low-power ones. In some benchmarks, the x86 laptop CPUs record higher performance, but at a higher clock and with a higher TDP. I don't have the IPC numbers for either, but with a lot of execution ports, its huge reorder buffer and the less strict memory consistency model, I suspect the IPC to be higher on the M1.
When you are doing serious work, the M1 is really a four core CPU and nothing else.
M1 cores have higher IPC, yes. They are also bigger and slower. Larger reorder buffers and more flexible memory models mean bigger cores which mean slower clock speeds at the same power consumption.
The M1 also doesn't have SMT, which is an easy +20% IPC.
If you measure the performance per core and the power consumption per core, and of course I'm talking only high performance cores, then last gen x86 laptop CPUs are right there despite higher performance.