That IPC figure is a bit misleading because different designs clock differently, for example the Apple designs likely have shorter pipelines which uses cycles a

That IPC figure is a bit misleading because different designs clock differently, for example the Apple designs likely have shorter pipelines which uses cycles and power more efficiently but won't support higher clock speeds. I doubt an M1 could hit 7.8GHz no matter how much cooling you gave it, but the Intel design will never be as energy efficient. Apple has different manufacturing constraints because vertical integration likely lets them spend more on the dies, they are using better fabs, etc. Meanwhile they prioritize having very few variants in a way Intel doesn't (or from another standpoint can't because they need more SKUs to sell). The engineers who do this stuff are living in 100-dimensional tradeoff land though, unlike what popular tech rants tend to imply there are no free lunches. At a higher level it is just hard to do designs at this complexity so the dominating factor is budget divided by how many different products the team needs to make. Intel is the outlier, they managed to sabotage their own dominant position, but across the rest of the CPU world this holds true.