How far behind Apple are AMD at the moment? If ryzen chips were optimized for low power and manufactured on TSMC’s 5nm process like the M1, what sort of performance difference would we be seeing?
On the flip side, once you go bigger the game changes. If you increase the M1 power consumption to amount for interconnects, more memory lanes, more IO, etc the M1 seems to offer worse power to performance that shouldn’t be too unexpected. ARM just announced they are splitting into V1 (performance above all) and N2 (best power, size, performance combo)
Mac mini uses like 25-27w at the wall. 15-25w TDP for the 5800u doesn't include RAM (it's LPDDR4 at 1.1v will use a lot more power than M1 LPDDR4x at 0.6v). 5800u also has a chipset that consumes a few watts.
5800u has some features that the M1 does not (these would likely increase M1 power usage), but still doesn't seem close in power consumption.
4800u isn’t that different as far as power goes (mostly different in performance). A mini-PC with it uses almost 70 watts under load.
https://www.anandtech.com/show/16236/asrock-4x4-box4800u-ren...