Anandtech has you on that, hell, that's not even how the M1 works, when at full use the M1 uses all 8 cores pooled. The M1 is a quad-Big core, quad-little core

Anandtech has you on that, hell, that's not even how the M1 works, when at full use the M1 uses all 8 cores pooled. The M1 is a quad-Big core, quad-little core Chip with a roughly 30W TDP at max use, (that's the Performance/Watt number to work off, Mac OS reports it at 5w per core + 3W for the little cores combined), this is including it's GTX 1050-class GPU. We have the numbers, we know where things stand. Fact of the matter is that Ryzen 5000 is just 7nm chips and the M1 is 5nm. For a ULV chip, it is shockingly competitive and superior to 5000-series chips in single threaded (Most GP computing is still threadlocked.) and lightly-threaded ( up to four core use) tasks. A critical thing to realize about the M1 is that it lacks turbo modes, so single-thread performance scales with cores unlike most x86 Chips that slow to handle more than 1 core at full use. 5000 series chips with more than four cores have advantages in massively threaded workloads but that is absolutely not a reasonable comparison with the M1 in the first place as they are much higher wattage chips in a very different market and comparing a 45w chip with the M1 is a joke to start in the same way you just explained above. The M1 is a sweet spot chip that is not better than everything at all wattages but in a lot of cases is much better at most things. I think a lot of the praise has driven some untrue claims of how 'amazing' the M1 is and made some people think that it compares with threadripper or such in multicore when it's not true and that has driven some unfair skepticism against the M1 as well. Watt per watt, core per core, the M1 is faster and cooler than anything AMD has, once you let cores increase and wattage rise, you will find faster multicore performance.