How does the M1 compare to this Intel chip or the AMD chips it's being compared too? My understanding is they are still quite a bit slower.
Because the M1 Max is not less than half
https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/compare/11136167?baseli...
A15 has already been out and spoiled what's coming in M2.
Size
M1 is 119mm^2 and M2 is probably at most around 130-140mm^2 (depending on cache and RAM controllers) which is still smaller than 5800U at 180mm^2 and much smaller than Alder Lake mobile at 215mm^2.
Cache
A14 and M1 have 16mb of SLC (system level cache). A14 has 8mb L2 while M1 has 12mb. A15 doubled to 32mb SLC and jumped from 8 to 12mb L2. I suspect M2 keeps the 32mb. 12 or 16mb of cache will depend on the performance increase, but I suspect they'll stick with 12mb.
5800U has 4mb of L2 cache and 16mb of L3 cache. Alder Lake desktop has 14mb L2 cache and 30mb L3 cache (dropping to 9.5mb L2 and 20mb L3 on the 12600 and 7.5mb L2 and 18mb L3 on the leaked 12400).
Power
Peak power for M1 is around 15-20w absolute max power. A15 improved power efficiency 17% over A14, so we could actually see power usage improve. Those massive caches may slightly increase chip power, but they decrease memory accesses which radically decrease total system power. The chip running at far lower peak frequencies further helps to keep cache power consumption under control.
5800U can hit upwards of 50-60w peak power to keep the stated turbo speeds. Current Intel chips do this too and I suspect that Alder Lake won't be any different here.
CPU Performance
A15 P-core increases 8-10% (up to 37% on some things) and a lot of that was integer improvements. A15 E-core increased performance by about 30%. Their actual performance is close to Zen 2. Overall, performance in A15 was around 20% better than A14. GPU performance also jumped 32%.
M1 already handily beats 5800U in pretty much everything. I'd bet heavily that M1 beats the little Alder lake. I'm less sure about the bigger alder lake because I don't know what frequencies it will be able to sustain (I'd bet it still beats out M2 though).
GPU Performance
M1 shares SLC between the CPU and GPU. This works much like AMD's Infinity fabric to reduce necessary bandwidth and allows a pretty big increase in GPU performance over what would otherwise be possible.
AMD hit the iGPU wall a few years ago. They've slowly increased GPU resources as DDR bandwidth has increased, but that's about it. I'm really looking forward to Zen 4/5 + RDNA 2/3 + Infinity Cache, but I don't know when that will actually arrive. I've seen iGPU tests of the U770 on Alder Lake desktop and it's not even as fast as last-gen Iris Xe. The mobile variant will have 3x the GPU resources, but it still only looks to be 30% faster than last-gen and then only if it isn't bandwidth limited. This seems possible with DDR5, but I'd guess it's capped at last-gen performance on DDR4 systems.