This is one place where the 64-bit ARM ISA design shines: since all instructions are exactly 4 bytes wide and always aligned to 4 bytes, it's easy to make a very wide decoder, since there's no need to compute the instruction length and align the instruction stream before decoding.
That's exactly what I said. It's faster, but not an order of magnitude faster and different workloads will perform differently depending on a multitude of factors (even if benchmarks don't). Do not expect it to outperform a not-too-old top-of-the-line mobile CPU by a large margin.
Zen 3 slightly outperforms the iPhone chip, but it runs it's clocks slower to stay inside a 5 watt power draw.
https://www.anandtech.com/show/16226/apple-silicon-m1-a14-de...
So, yes. Expect it to outperform Tiger Lake and Zen 3, at least on a per core basis.
Apple chips with more cores will come in time as well.
It's the per core performance, especially at a given power draw, that matters going forward.
Anandtech's deep dive provides several examples of advances in Apple's core design that didn't involve magic or breaking the laws of physics. For example...
Instruction Decode:
>What really defines Apple’s Firestorm CPU core from other designs in the industry is just the sheer width of the microarchitecture. Featuring an 8-wide decode block, Apple’s Firestorm is by far the current widest commercialized design in the industry. Other contemporary designs such as AMD’s Zen(1 through 3) and Intel’s µarch’s, x86 CPUs today still only feature a 4-wide decoder designs
Instruction Re-order Buffer Size:
>A +-630 deep ROB is an immensely huge out-of-order window for Apple’s new core, as it vastly outclasses any other design in the industry. Intel’s Sunny Cove and Willow Cove cores are the second-most “deep” OOO designs out there with a 352 ROB structure, while AMD’s newest Zen3 core makes due with 256 entries, and recent Arm designs such as the Cortex-X1 feature a 224 structure.
Number of Execution Units:
>On the Integer side, we find at least 7 execution ports for actual arithmetic operations. These include 4 simple ALUs capable of ADD instructions, 2 complex units which feature also MUL (multiply) capabilities, and what appears to be a dedicated integer division unit.
On the floating point and vector execution side of things, the new Firestorm cores are actually more impressive as they a 33% increase in capabilities, enabled by Apple’s addition of a fourth execution pipeline.
https://www.anandtech.com/show/16226/apple-silicon-m1-a14-de...