Since you are clearly referring to Rosetta 2:
- It is not an emulation. It is a translation. That alone is a 10-100x speed difference.
- It is not always faster; it highly depends on the specific code to run. Some code is miraculously faster, some is only at about 50% or lower.
- The comparison is "apples vs. oranges" because it's only comparing against Intel Macs, which do not use the fastest x86-64 chips on the market. Most importantly, AMD processors are not included in this comparison at all.
Constructing a general superiority of ARM vs. x86 based on this flawed premise is really far-fetched.
For me what the M1 shows is not that x86 is dead and ARM is the future, or even that Intel or AMD are toast, it's that the days of the traditional socketed CPU and modular RAM are numbered.
10 years from now we'll all be using gigantic 32 core x86 SoC's with onboard RAM and GPU, and perhaps people on HN cheering on Apple now won't be when hobbiest PC building is a thing of the past.
We came to a point when X86 is faster to emulate, than to run on a more modern microarchitecture.
One point is clear: per-transistor performance of X86 is dimishing with each new core generation, and it is already losing to M1.
X86 makers will not be able to keep up for long. They will have to keep releasing bigger, and hotter chips to keep parity, until they cannot.