Apple does have a huge advantage, of having on package ram, which is easier (lower power) to drive at high speed speed.
There's endless people who will mindlessly repeat that ARM is more efficient x86, but it feels much more of a received dogma. Once you get past the decoder stage, there's far more in common than different between cores. The instruction set simply doesn't make a big enough difference.
At work I got a MacBook M2 first and it is absolutelly cold. Then I requested a change to a ThinkPad, because I find MacOS super weird so not an Apple fanboy, more or less same year (maybe one year before it so M1 year) and it gets hot. Really hot. And I mostly use browser apps, so is not like I am playing games, doing rendering, or AI, or any high consuming job and the difference is huge. The M2 also lasts 16 hours on one battery, maybe more. The thinkpad luckily 8.
Apple's chips are based on the ARM architecture, which is inherently more power-efficient than the x86 architecture used by AMD and Intel for their laptops. Apple also designs these chips in-house.
Apple is using a combination of high-performance and high-efficiency cores (Big.LITTLE architecture), allowing the chip to balance performance and power usage based on the task at hand. They also include dedicated hardware for specific tasks (like video encoding/decoding), which can be more efficient than performing these tasks on general-purpose cores.
AMD and Intel design chips for a wide range of devices and systems, requiring a more generic approach. This limits their ability to optimise for specific hardware and software combinations. Apple designs chips solely for its own products, allowing for tighter integration between chip, hardware, and software.
I understand that Apple controls much more its ecosystem than either AMD or Intel, but I cannot imagine a M1/2/3 being less "generic" than an AMD/Intel, care to elaborate?
Also, the question is what makes the architecture more power hungry. Originally there was this disctinction of CISC (intel/amd) vs RISC (arm/apple) but my understanding is that at least intel/amd have some cisc runnning on risc architecture, meaning, externally it looks like a cisc/x64, but internally is a risc or riscish.
Apple does have a huge advantage, of having on package ram, which is easier (lower power) to drive at high speed speed.
There's endless people who will mindlessly repeat that ARM is more efficient x86, but it feels much more of a received dogma. Once you get past the decoder stage, there's far more in common than different between cores. The instruction set simply doesn't make a big enough difference.