Ofcourse, but that's the whole point right? At similar power levels, Apple M-series is a lot faster. The only way for AMD and Intel to compete on performance is by providing more power, but this obviously has a negative effect on efficiency. So with AMD/Intel you have to choose: efficient and slow or inefficient and fast. With Apple you can actually have it both ways.
> Ofcourse, but that's the whole point right? At similar power levels, Apple M-series is a lot faster. The only way for AMD and Intel to compete on performance is by providing more power
They're saying the exact opposite of that. Their claim is that all the extra power is only juicing performance a little bit, so at similar power levels the performance is not all that far apart.
OK, so I'm still curious about the underlying efficiency. Is there a better test of single core efficiency at the same TDP? Does Apple Silicon provide any noticeable improvement over other x86 or Arm chips in that scenario, or is it really just a straightforward function of process and node size?
Your link is comparing the M3 against AMD chips with higher TDPs. Higher TDPs tank "single-core efficiency" because power consumption is non-linear with clock speed. Give a core near its limit three times the power budget and you're basically dividing the single-core efficiency by three because you burn three times more power and barely improve single-thread performance at all, and then that's exactly what you see there.
To have a useful comparison you have to compare the efficiency of CPUs when they're set to use the same amount of power.