A significant reason for the high performance of Mac OS on M1 is that the M1 has been tweaked to optimize common Mac OS/ObjectiveC/Swift operations. In one interview, Apple engineers said that they worked on speeding up the operation to allocate and deallocate objects by 5x over Intel chips. That kind of operation is common and used in loops and in the reference count garbage collection used by those languages. By doing this kind of optimization they can tune the SOC to the OS. That is hard to do for commodity chips.