This is not only Apple. All modern mobile ARM processors, ones that are used in Androids, too, they all are far ahead of Intel in TDP to performance ratio, almost by order of magnitude. Just make bigger ARM chips with more high-perf cores, and they will destroy Intel.
Not even close to true. Apple's ARM processors are unlike anyone else's, and everyone else's ARM processors are not particularly impressive. The power/performance isn't really there, and scaling performance up is not linear, either. You can't just "make it bigger" and retain the same power/performance ratio you had. The 1W power draw that the 'big' ARM cores target, like the Cortex-A78, isn't even that special. You can run x86 cores at 1W/core all day long as well. How it performs at the power level is the question, but the ARM cores don't really perform all that well. See for example the slaughtering that is the 64-core Graviton2 vs. the 64-core Epyc Rome: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=epyc-vs-... (spoiler, the x86 chip has an overall performance lead of 50%, and they really aren't targeting that different of a power budget)
But even the M1 isn't an order of magnitude ahead on power/performance ratio. It's the leader, but it's sure as shit not 10x faster for the same power draw.
Android phones with Qualcom Snapdragon 865 scores better than an Intel i7 7700HQ (4 cores, 8 threads) on Geekbench on multi-core and ties on single core while using a magnitude less energy.
While this i7 model is not new, it's not the "U" low voltage processor version.
I could see Qualcom getting fancy and trying to scale their processors at 5nm.
The last time the i7-7700HQ was sold in a Mac was for the mid-2017, 15" MBP. The current gen (late-2019) base model 16" MBP uses a i7-9750H.
Single core performance is ~17.5% better and multi-core performance is ~51.2% better than the 865. The numbers are still surprisingly close given that the Snapdragon uses significantly less power.
Qualcomm hasn't been able to "just make bigger ARM chips with more high-perf cores" and destroyed Intel for many years now - and not for lack of trying to displace Intel in the laptop market. Same with other ARM manufacturers. Apple did something unique with M1. I don't know what it is but at their current rate of improving in-house silicon the M2 is likely to be the best performing single thread chip in the world regardless of company, architecture, or power envelope. And that's not done by being the same as everyone else except the clever idea to "just make it bigger".
