Many people overstate Apple's achievement, in reality most credit should go to TSMC the company that manufactures the M1 chip. The M1 is a 5nm chip, while the i9 is a 14nm chip! The M1 has about 16b transistor, the i9 has only about half of that amount. Apple's only achievement here was to make a deal with TSMC in order to be the first one to use their 5nm technology.
> Apple's only achievement here was to make a deal with TSMC So Microsoft could just fly to Taiwan, hand over a few billion and magically they have an M1 chip. I wish we could all live in your delusional fantasy world because life sounds easy there.
My point here is not to deny the achievement of creating your own chip design, but rather demystify how the M1 achieves its performance, and I believe it has mainly to do with TSMC's 5nm technology and the huge number of transistors.
If you look up here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transistor_count
You'll see that the M1 is the first CPU/GPU (for computers) to use 5nm and one of the biggest by transistor count.
Considering those facts I think it is very unfair to claim that the M1 is faster only because of some Apple magic.
The Ryzen used in this test is also made by TSMC but using a 7nm process.
According to TSMC moving from 7nm to 5nm means 84% more transistors for the same chip size with a 15% speed improvement or a 30% lower power consumption.