Earlier quoted context omitted.
Intel's current design are 1-3 years late depending on which roadmap and sector you are counting. Caused by their 10nm delay. Intel had Tigerlake / WillowCove Design but they cant ship it. They also have Golden Cove. If you have put the design they were suppose to be using now, on a IPC basis Intel might still be in the lead.
So basically given the same process, all companies have almost a similar offering?
If you read the anandtech article describing the A14/M1 chips, it seems that the ARM ISA lets Apple do some things that are either exceptionally hard or impossible on x86, like making individual cores much “wider” in terms of instruction decode, allowing the A14/M1 cores to do significant parallel execution. This allows their cores to be significantly more efficient in terms of instructions per clock cycle. To be clear this isn’t just the benefits of ARM - Apple is far ahead of other ARM designers as well. On the other hand, the wider the execution pipeline, generally the slower the cores have to be clocked (Im actually not sure why this is, to be honest). This is part of how Intel is able to produce chips in the 5.0+ GHz range.
So it’s not that every designer converges to the same design (internally, they’re quite different). Instead, what’s happening is that all the relevant trade offs (pipeline width and depth, ISA, fab tech, power targets, etc) are leaving competitors within an order of magnitude in performance. And the question of who’s going to take the lead is a question of who’s executing best on all these fronts, and who’s currently got a lot of talent working on areas that will see continued improvement.
But whatever happens, I wouldn’t bet against Apple. Their team has been delivering improvements like clockwork, year over year for quite a long time now.