I'm not telling that process difference isn't the part of the picture, but the process difference is at most half of the story.

Working on HPC field and with generations and generations of Intel hardware, I can tell you that two node difference (alone) never gives you 25% real world performance in the realm of Intel, let alone theoretical.

Even a single node difference can easily come close to a 25% increase in performance: "N5 technology provides about 20% faster speed than N7 technology or about 40% power reduction." [1]

Real world performance pretty much always lines up with these estimates. It's the main reason why we have exponential growth in computing power in the first place.

It would be a more fair comparison to compare the M1 to AMD's ZEN 4, which should be coming out next quarter.

[1] https://www.tsmc.com/english/dedicatedFoundry/technology/log...

This isn't a normal die shrink though.

This is jumping from Intel's heroically old 14nm+++++++++++++++ to a brand spanking new TSMC process. It might be on the order of 4 to 6 times denser.

I'm all for competition to be honest. While Intel is the least favorite CPU maker of mine (due to their unethical moves in the past), I'd love to see fierce competition rather than a single dominant power.

We've seen how the latter went until AMD came back to the game.