Apple has been at it for 12 years (they bought PA Semi in 2008). The talent they brought onboard with PA Semi had been producing processors since 2003.

Experience counts, but Apple is pretty old-hat at this by now as well.

Apple has been designing chips since the A4 in 2010. Samsung, TMSC, and other manufacturers with more experience actually build the chips for Apple, and this M1 is no exception being manufactured by TMSC.

Isn’t that just the ARM vs x86 difference? They’re completely different architectures, each with their own benefits and drawbacks.

With the size of modern chips the instruction set has very little to do with an overall chip design. Most of it is a balancing act between power, performance and area for things like caches, controllers, optimizations, accelerators and so on. Then there are also factors like verification complexity and the fab technology you are choosing.

I would have thought so too, but why are there no ARM based competitors coming out with similar numbers? Or are there?

Graviton2 I expect would stack up nicely.

One factor seems to be the vertical integration. It seems like these days there are a bunch of large companies succeeding by having the users of the hardware involved tightly with the the designers of that hardware. Tesla is definitely doing it. I think Google is doing it with machine learning. And Apple has definitely been doing it with their phones and tablets. The feedback loop is tight, valuable, and beneficial. No need to make big compromises for backward compatibility, either, just update the software.