Before Apple's M1, ARM was slow and near unusable for x86-class machines. There were some cheap ARM Chromebooks with a much shorter lifespan than their x86-base

Before Apple's M1, ARM was slow and near unusable for x86-class machines. There were some cheap ARM Chromebooks with a much shorter lifespan than their x86-based brethren, and an ARM tablet that Microsoft abandoned, and that's about it. After the M1, the ARM companies needed to up their game, and Qualcom is rumoured to finally release something competitive to a real x64 chip in the near future. This isn't the first time they've made claims like these, though, and I very much doubt they'll live up to their promise. Meanwhile, x64 has caught up to Apple in terms of compute power (especially per dollar, which is the reason x64 is so popular), is getting closer and closer to Apple's power consumption levels, and unless the M4 will have dramatically more performance, the ARM overtake will just have been an outlier. I'm not so sure how long non-Apple ARM will be able to stay competitive given the turnaround x64 has managed to make in just a few short years. It looks like x64 still has plenty of room for improvement, and this proves that the reason compute performance has plateaued was that there was no real competition.