> Right now, Apple Silicon tops out at 12 cores (8 performance and 4 efficiency). If I'm a data center, I'm going to likely prefer an AMD EPYC with 64 cores (and 128 threads) over an Apple M2 with 8 performance cores. I can slice that AMD EPYC into a lot more VMs.

I think it's worth calling out how important this is. Once you get past a certain die size and core count interconnect or "fabric" latency and bandwidth starts to have a much bigger impact on loads than core speed and throughput for code not optimized for that processor. Where M2 is... Apple doesn't have to deal with that at all. AMD on the other hand has gone all in, hence chiplet designs. But yeah Apple wants nothing to do with that, hence they seem to be going for very wide but limited core count designs.