The talent behind M1 left Apple years ago, because they weren't giving enough stocks, bonuses. So, Apple is left with fixers. I don't expect Apple to bring another revolution in chips.
https://www.semianalysis.com/p/apple-cpu-gains-grind-to-a-ha...
https://www.semianalysis.com/p/apple-m2-die-shot-and-archite...
The Cortex X3 at TSMC N4 used in the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 clocked at 3.26Ghz gets you about ~1500 GB5 Single Core at ~4W.
The Apple A16 on the same TSMC N4 clocked at 3.6Ghz gets you about ~1900 GB5 Score using ~5W.
The Cortex X3 is much smaller in die size, and only just started optimising specifically for AArach64. Compared to Apple which is on their forth or fifth iteration. I would not be surprised if the Cortex X4 breaks the 1800 barrier using under 5W. Compared to a few years ago Apple SoC vs Snapdragon where single core performance differ by more than 2x. The projected difference between the two will be less than 20%.
The more interesting question would be, what happens when Cortex X4 and Cortex X5 reaches these sort of performance, which is good enough to be used in PC and only cost a a few dollars per core in licensing?
So it's amazing to see the bread and butter catch up, what we really need are those other blocks available under license from someone akin to ARM.
There are plenty to choose from. Samsung or Mediatek didn't invent all the stuff in their SoC, and neither did Apple. GPU IPs are available from ARM ( Mali ) and IMG ( PowerVR ). FPGA form Lattice which Apple are using. DSP and other 5G modem solution from CEVA. There are plenty of options to choose from. And as far as I am concern, none of them are as far ahead, or as difficult to overcome than CPU design.
Are they still using their Technology and IP [1]. Yes.
[1] https://www.imaginationtech.com/news/imagination-and-apple-s...