The A15 performance cores seem to be equivalent in performance to AMD Ryzen 5950x desktop cores, at 1/5th of the power budget.
True, AMD has a few tricks up their sleeve, and is a node behind Apple at TSMC, but on a purely technical level it's clear that Apple ahead of both AMD and Intel.
The power consumption is very impressive indeed. But, I think there are many compromises to be made when scaling up, so we'll see how the M2 performs in this regard. However, aside from power consumption, I find it interesting that people refer to it as such a revolution. Maybe I'm just imagining a unspoken "... for what is to come". Because as is, the only thing the M1 does better than it's competition is arguably the power consumption. The 5950x you mention, although an apples to oranges comparison will outperform highly parallelizable tasks by a factor of 4. Throw in a top end GPU and it becomes a factor of 14.
Now, power consumption may be the end all be all for some people. If your work tasks actually don't require a lot of computational power, then I can see it being much more valuable to have the flexibility of a cool laptop with a long battery life.
But, touting the M1 as revolutionary, because all that matters is power consumption, feels like a disconnect to me. I'm all for people liking stuff they like. But, I don't get what's revolutionary at all. I was interesting in hearing what people thought about it though.
The reason why I asked was because you say x86, but you don't mean the competition of x86, but the older generation of apple's x86 based hardware. Also, three of those things you mention are arguably the same -- quieter, cooler and battery life are all tied to power efficiency, which the M1 excels at. So, it is kinda like with every discussion thread on the M1, everyone kinda suggesting it is a powerful CPU, while it is just power efficient. From a computational point of view, where it matters, it is far behind the competition. "Catching up to x86" in this regard makes very little sense, but you also explicitly omit computational power, which of course is accurate. I certainly would not think this was revolutionary for a CPU any sense of the word, but to each their own.
This discussion also comes up again and again on HN on the M1. People say weird things like that the never experienced such a jump in computational power from one generation to the next. And what they tend to mean is from older apple hardware to newer hardware.
