> You seem to be ignoring the benchmarks where the M1 beats the Ryzen 9 5950X on several--but not all--benchmarks.
These are all single-threaded benchmarks. They don't even list the 5950X for the multi-threaded benchmarks because it's not even a comparison -- CineBench R23 MT for the M1 is 7833, the 5950X is 28641.
> And regarding power consumption: While AMD’s Zen3 still holds the leads in several workloads, we need to remind ourselves that this comes at a great cost in power consumption in the +49W range while the Apple M1 here is using 7-8W total device active power.
Which is, again, not surprising, because of the way CPU power curves work. The mobile Ryzen U-series processors have a similar power consumption to the M1. The desktop versions of the same processors are only slightly faster for a single thread but use a lot more power, because that last few hundred MHz is extremely inefficient and has only a marginal performance gain, so you only do that on desktop where power consumption isn't a priority.
A mobile processor being more power efficient than a desktop processor isn't a novelty. A mobile processor having about the same single thread performance as a desktop processor isn't a novelty. These things are par for the course. If they weren't true you aren't even in the game. Desktop processors primarily use their TDP to hold higher clocks even when running many threads.
> at a fraction of the cost
But you're again comparing a 16-core desktop processor to a 4+4 core mobile processor when the desktop processor would embarrass it on anything threaded, which is why it costs more. The lower core count processors have nearly the same single thread performance and cost less than half as much, and the "budget" Zen 3 processors, which should again have similar single thread performance, weren't the first to be released.
> It has to make one wonder what the results will be when Apple ships a processor made for higher-end desktops, where they won't have the thermal and power restrictions of a laptop processor?
It's not hard to infer what would happen. It would have marginally better single thread performance and much better multi-thread performance. Which is what the competing desktop processors already have.
> You know there are prototypes in Apple's lab now that far surpass Ryzen that'll be in machines spring/summer 2021.
But then it'll be competing with Zen 4 on 5nm and Socket AM5 with DDR5 memory. And 5nm and faster memory are two of the obvious reasons that the M1 is competitive as it is.