I have 4 issues with your comment:

1. AMD and apple use different methods for measuring effect. So AMD 35W and apples 18W are not directly comparable.

2. Despite what HN top posts want you to believe newset Zen3 has a performance advantage over M1. Hence at this point it make sense to concentrate on reducing power usage.

3. AMD64 is basically internally a RISC.

4. Why does _any_ post on _anything_ quickly turns into praising apple? You are stealing attention from the real discussion.

Good comment except this:

> 3. AMD64 is basically internally a RISC.

They decode some rarely used instructions into multiple micro-ops, but these micro-ops can be very complex still. Example:

    vfmadd231ps ymm1, ymm2, ymmword ptr [rsi + 4*rcx + 96]

The above instruction computes quite a lot of stuff (first the read address, then 8-wide multiply+add), yet on most modern CPUs including AMD Zen 2 it decodes into a single micro-op.

More often the opposite happens, AMD64 instructions are merged into a single micro-op, this is called macro-op fusion.

Ah yes why bother. Why didn't AMD just give up when it was down and Intel processors smoked them. Why didn't Intel just give up when AMD processors where better. It's a matter of time until AMD, Intel or a different company smokes Apple silicon. If everyone would just gave up at the drop of a hat it would mean stagnation.

Because Apple silicon is not for sale? (unless you think buying 3k laptops so you can harvest their CPU is some kind of sane business model)

There are plenty of things you could use such processor in.

Unless Apple decides and starts selling it's own silicon, their performance doesn't matter at all to people who need to source CPU to build whatever they are building.

You can't ship "but in benchmarks it beats competition"

People still want to buy non-Apple laptops, especially for non-Apple prices, and M1 isn't available outside the silo.

x86 tends to have more I/O than ARM Phone SoCs where a reasonably powerful CPU is simply trapped in the SoC with no meaningful way to take advantage of it either in laptops or for desktops. The Raspberry Pi has 1 PCIe 2.0 lane. A lot of x86 chips have 4 lanes and usually at least PCIe 3.0 if not PCIe 4.0.

The other problem is that "Apple Silicon" is just one slice of the market. When you think about how you didn't even mention ARM it kind of shows that you have very little confidence in ARM yet you still bash x86.

Because Apple is not that great and low power computation is worthwhile engineering regardless of performance characteristics.