Surprising results. Definitely not in the "very far" range.
Keep in mind the 6850U you're comparing against has a fan too. Notebookcheck says it has a 40W turbo on the gen 2 model, and the gen 3 Intel version has a 28W sustained boost. An M2 uses around 20W.
Also, a lot of those benchmarks are showing all x86 CPUs with a 3x+ lead, which indicates software optimization problems. Geekbench 5 is optimized for both arm64 and x86 and shows the M2 ahead of the 6800U. There are also just broken results like the LC0 test where the M1 is substantially faster than the M2. Overall, your results don't seem very valid.
> Overall, your results don't seem very valid.
They're not "my" results, and thermals were not part of the discussion.
Regarding performance, if one wants to be rigorous (and that's why I didn't state "68xx is faster than Mx"), one can't make absolute claims either way, as Torvalds himself has criticized Geekbench.
I still think that describing the performance difference as "not very far" is a valid assessment.
The Ryzen chips are already clocking over 3 GHz, so there isn't much more scaling from power left. That's why 5nm Zen4 probably won't move the needle too much.