Jim was involved in the early versions of Zen & M1, I believe he knows.
Apples M series looks very impressive because typically, at launch, they are node ahead of the competition, so early access deals with TSMC is the secret weapon this buys them about 6 months. They also are primarily laptop chips, AMD has competitive technology but always launches the low power chips after the desktop & server parts.
> so early access deals with TSMC is the secret weapon this buys them about 6 months
Aren't Apple typically 2 years ahead? M1 came out 2020, other CPUs from the same node level (5 nm TSMC) came out 2022. If you mean apple launches their 6 months ahead of the rest of the industry gets on the previous node, sure, but not the current node.
What you are thinking about is maybe that AMD 7nm is comparable to Apple 5nm, but really what you should compare is todays AMD cpus with the Apple cpu from 2022, since they are on the same architecture.
But yeah, all the impressive bits about Apple performance disapears once you take architecture into account.
Apples M series looks very impressive because typically, at launch, they are node ahead of the competition, so early access deals with TSMC is the secret weapon this buys them about 6 months. They also are primarily laptop chips, AMD has competitive technology but always launches the low power chips after the desktop & server parts.