Your comment is unclear.

Apple's contribution to M1 was the design. TSMC built the next gen fabs, and gets credit for the manufacturing.

You can't compare viability or success of the processor design when you compare cross fab generations. It's apples to oranges.

You can state that M1 is better, which is true, but it doesn't follow at all that it's due to the design component.

It could very well be that moving Intel's design to TSMC's fab would lead to it running circles around M1

I mean this is pretty obvious stuff, but these threads always end up full of people that don't understand hardware very well

> It could very well be that moving Intel's design to TSMC's fab would lead to it running circles around M1

Or not. There is no reason to believe Apple design has not been a major contribution to the performance. Sure TSMC process is a major component but to quote yourself it does not follow that that explains all of it. It could very well be that a hypothetical Apple design to Intel fab would still run circles around current Intel chips (or not). What we do know is system architecture is sufficiently different, and that it is likely to have a material impact on performance.

That’s just not true. The RISC instruction set has a growing advantage in performance per watt. There’s a reason no one is producing low-power x86 chips.

Surely it's a shrinking advantage? x86 CPUs have been microcode based for a long time, and the hardware to convert x86 instructions to micro ops is a relatively fixed cost that diminishes over time with process shrinks?