Actually i'd bet that you're both wrong. What M1 does well isn't that "ARM-is-better" or that they're using a smaller process (even if both factors probably plays into helping the M1 chips edge a few %).

Rather i suspect that the main benefit that M1 has in many real world benchmarks is that it has on-chip memory, cache-miss latency is a huge cost in the real world (why games has drifted towards DoD internals), so sidestepping that issue to a large extent by integrating memory on-die gives it a great boost.

I'm betting once they've reverse engineered the M1 perf, we will see multi-GB caches on AMD/Intel chips within 4 years.

There's nothing to "reverse engineer" there: M1 has 4x the L1 cache and a wider bus. That's it.

This cannot be implemented in AMD's current 7nm process due to size restrictions.

The SoC-side of the story is also contrary to the very core design of a general purpose CPU. RAM, GPU, and extension cards for specialised tasks are already covered by 3rd party products on the PCIe and USB4 buses and AMD has no interest in cannibalising their GPU and console business...

With their upcoming discrete GPUs and accelerator cards, Intel might be in the same boat w.r.t. SoC design.

The M1 has an L1 cache with less than 0.5 KB per core and an L2 with about 4 MB shared by all cores. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_M1

> What M1 does well isn't that "ARM-is-better"

Of course, not all to it, but denying that having to emulate a 40 years old ISA does not place a huge cost on transistor count, and efficiency is impossible.