The smaller machines are also likely held back by cooling solutions, so if you have Intel beat on power efficiency in a tiny form factor, you can boost your clock speed too.
Normalizing for performance (say A14 vs 5950X at 4.5GHz instead of 5GHz) would close the gap somewhat, but it's still huge. Perhaps 4x instead of 10x - those last 500MHz on the AMD chip cost a ton of power.
Of course, none of this is particularly surprising considering Apple is using both a newer process and gets nearly 60% higher IPC.
[1]: https://www.anandtech.com/show/16226/apple-silicon-m1-a14-de...
AMD has a laptop series of CPUs, M1 compared to that is the only relevant comparison - the rest is apples to oranges.
I would say on your topic though that Intel has a hybrid chip that might interest you. Lakefield pairs 4 modified Tremont cores with 1 Sunny Cove core.
https://www.anandtech.com/show/15877/intel-hybrid-cpu-lakefi...
I'd like to see 2 zen cores paired with 4 updated jaguar cores.
That being said Apple has an advantage in that they control the entire stack and on the power efficiency side of things they have experience with mobile CPU design, they can do stuff like heterogeneous cores and can optimise for it throughout the stack, I think it would be challenging for x86 to do the same.