How much of the performance / power efficiency do you think is attributed to design (and vertical integration) versus being built on a smaller transistor size?
If Intel x86 chips were on 5nm today, what do you think the power efficiency/performance gap would be?
What if M1 chips were on 10nm and Intel on 5nm?
(I know this is an extremely complicated topic, involving microarchitecture, software optimization, use cases, etc.) Fun to poke around and speculate.
We already have an Apple Silicon chip that's 10nm. That's the A11.
Benchmark results for an iPhone X with an Apple A11 Bionic processor.
browser.geekbench.com
And here's Intel "at its best" on 14nm, which is said to be "equivalent to TSMC 10nm":
Benchmark results for a Dell Inc. XPS 13 9365 with an Intel Core i7-7Y75 processor.
browser.geekbench.com
So even if M1 and Intel chips were on the same (or equivalent) process node, performance difference may not be so pronounced anymore, but... M1 will still be vastly more efficient. So in the worst case, we'll have an Apple Silicon MacBook that performs basically about the same as the Intel counterpart, but with 20 hours of battery life, and still much cooler than the Intel counterpart.
And here's what people had to say about that particular laptop above:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Dell/comments/9vnvx5
Efficiency is a big problem for Intel chips, and I don't think Intel will be able to solve that any time soon.
But that's for efficiency. If efficiency is not such a big deal, and performance is all that matters, Intel and Apple Silicon on the same process will be an interesting matchup, I think.
Sadly, we probably won't see that any time soon. It's clear Intel will be far behind Apple in 2 years. TSMC is already going to move on to 3nm by the end of next year.