Most of the chip-heads' deep hatred for x86 comes from the number of pain-points for dealing with its ISA. In terms of actual raw performance the instruction s

Most of the chip-heads' deep hatred for x86 comes from the number of pain-points for dealing with its ISA. In terms of actual raw performance the instruction set is extremely secondary to about 10 other architectural choices. The reason Apple is getting such performance is because it's caught up with all the cutting edge techniques Intel and AMD use, and a few more, and implemented them inside its core architecture.