Because there are a lot of issues with i9s in those form factors that leads to less perf than even an i7 from the same generation.

There was a Linus Tech Tips the other day about how even current gen Intel laptops can see better perf on an i7 than an i9. It looks like the i9s simply don't make sense in this thermal form factor and are essentially just overpriced chips for people who want to pay the most to have the biggest number.

The title is implying M1 is always better than every intel, given that I9 is the best intel (consumer) chip.

It's been known for years that apple has been limiting the intel chips by providing insufficient cooling. I don't overly care about how fast an M1 chips in a macbook is compared to an intel chip in a macbook. I want to know how fast an M1 is compared to a desktop I9 (given mac minis have M1 chips now), or compared to a properly cooled laptop latest-gen I9.

All this experiment shows is that insufficiently cooled processors perform worse than sufficiently cooled ones. It's a classic example of cherrypicking data. Admittedly, my solution would be different to the article's author. Instead of using a badly cooled laptop to compile stuff, I'd setup a build server running linux.

Oh come on, comparing it to the "best" intel mac laptop makes sense when you only care about that form factor/specific model, which is the case for a big part of many industries (Software included)

If it's only a matter of cooling why does the Intel also produce 4x the power consumption (not highlighted in the article, but still...).

If I wanted absolute best compile times I'd go build a threadripper workstation, but I need mobility and can't always rely on an Internet connection.

Well that's why the M1 is much better than the I9, not strictly because it's a faster chip, but because it's a more efficient chip. Efficiency = less cooling required.

I think part of it is because I don't care about mac computers. I'm interested in how the M1 - a consumer ARM chip - stacks up against the best x86_64 chip, not how it performs in one particular laptop.

Not to a desktop CPU no, but I'd rather see comparisons to laptops that don't have terrible thermal design. And to AMD as well as Intel - they're doing significantly better than Intel in the high power efficiency space afaik.

It just seems like a cherry picked fight - there's more to the laptop market watt/performance wise than 2019 macbooks.

Not sure why you are being downvoted.