5nm is incredible and should not be understated; but I don't think anyone on the outside can say "most credit" should go to TSMC. A lot of credit? Absolutely. Most credit? I don't know.
I'm not sure there are many engineers at Apple that truly understand what makes the M1 perform better. How people think they can just boil it down to just <x> is honestly confusing.
Of course there are, and those people are computer engineers or electrical engineers (and I'm sure many software folks as well, there are a lot of smart people in the world).
>How people think they can just boil it down to just <x> is honestly confusing.
I would wager you a bar tab that those people are all ill-informed developers. I am no expert in software, let alone hardware, but I am always suprised how often I see professional developers bemoan the fact that their laptop 'uses 12 gigs of ram' to run the OS + a few chrome tabs. A huge amount of devs don't know how their OS manages memory, let alone the ins and outs of the design and operation of modern microprocessors.