I think you misread the graph. https://www.apple.com/newsroom/images/product/mac/standard/A...

The graph there shows that the new chip is higher power usage at all performance levels.

Not all; it looks like the M1 running full-tilt is slightly less efficient for the same perf than the M1 Pro/Max. (I.e., the curves intersect.)

Yes, but only at the very extreme. It's normal that a high core count part at low clocks has higher efficiency (perf/power) at a given performance level than a low core count part at high clocks, since power grows super-linearly with clock speed (decreasing efficiency). But notably they've tuned the clock/power regime of the M1 Pro/Max CPUs that the crossover region here is very small.

I think this is pretty easy to math: M1 has 2x the efficiency cores of these new models. Those cores do a lot of work in measured workloads that will sometimes be scheduled on performance cores instead. The relative performance and efficiency lines up pretty well if you assume that a given benchmark is utilizing all cores.