For example, the Ryzen 9 5950X has single/multi core scores of 1,688/16,645 - which is higher in multi core score than the M1 Max, but lower in the single core.
>On an adjacent note, with a score of 7.28 in the integer suite, Apple’s A15 P-core is on equal footing with AMD’s Zen3-based Ryzen 5950X with a score of 7.29, and ahead of M1 with a score of 6.66.
https://www.anandtech.com/show/16983/the-apple-a15-soc-perfo...
On floating point, it's slightly ahead. 10.15 for the A15 vs. 9.79 for the 5950X.
Looking at a 1783/12693 on an 8-core CPU shows about a 10% scaling penalty from 1 to 8 cores - suppose a 32-core M1 came out for the Mac Pro that could scale only at 50% per core, that would still score over 28000, compared to the real-world top scorer, the 64-core 3990X scoring 25271.
At that point, their E-cores will have something like 80% the performance of a Zen 1 core. Zen 1 might not be the new hotness, but lots of people are perfectly fine with their Threadripper 1950X which Apple could almost match with 16 E-cores and only around 8 watts of peak power.
I suspect we'll see Apple joining ARM in three-tiered CPUs shortly. Adding a couple in-order cores just for tiny system processes that wake periodically, but don't actually do much just makes a ton of sense.