A couple points: 1. Transistor density isn't necessarily orthogonal to node size. Intel's 10nm process has a higher transistor density than some of TSMC and Sa

A couple points: 1. Transistor density isn't necessarily orthogonal to node size. Intel's 10nm process has a higher transistor density than some of TSMC and Samsung's 10, 8, and 7nm processes. 2. It doesn't matter if the M1 at 10 or 14nm would beat an i9, 5nm M1's are on sale and 5nm i9's don't exist. 3. The M1 is keeping up with or beating an i9 with fewer physical cores and no use of SMT. An M1 only has 4 "performance" cores, the "efficiency" cores aren't contributing overmuch to the overall number crunching. The i9's have 8 full physical cores with SMT. 4. The M1 is a development of the A-series chips so you can compare their performance at larger node sizes to the i9, it hasn't been good news for Intel for the past few years. The A12 and A13 have been impressive and they have only 2 "performance" cores. TSMC deserves a lot of praise for their manufacturing and process development. But the praise to go around is not zero sum, Apple deserves as much as TSMC. This is the exact same as AMD's Zen architecture being as deserving of praise for it's impressive performance over Intel's chips.