I'm not sure why you're getting downvoted. The M1 is ahead by 2-3x in performance per watt and highly competitive in performance/dollar. This result is indeed quite meaningless as Apple will have 16 high-performance core variants of the M1 soon.
I doubt that’s coming soon. The M1 is a HUGE chip. The decoders and pipelines take up a massive amount of space, and the L2 cache is apparently unwieldy, too. They’ve focused on making a limited number of cores perform very well, but there isn’t enough room. They need another die shrink to add any more.
I think the upcoming pro hardware will just be tweaks to the current formula.
Apple have 2 advantages here.
- They don’t play in the low-cost arena, people expect a Mac to be a bit more expensive, so they have a larger cost budget to work with
- They don’t have to make a profit on the CPU in particular, whereas Intel and AMD do.
Apple want a 38-40% margin on the whole shebang, and if it needs a more expensive chip, then that’s what’ll happen, maybe taking cost-savings from (2), and of necessary adding price because of (1).
I would be shocked if Platform Architecture at Apple didn’t already have 8, 16, and 32-core variants of the M series up and running, or at the very least in simulation. They’re coming, and the world will change. Again.