> Apple Silicon is built upon ARM64 which is apparently core to such great battery life.

Not really, actually. ARM isn’t terribly more efficient to decode than x86, and both are converted into micro-operations that are internal to the CPU.

The real strength is Apple’s custom ARM cores; as evidenced by the failure of Qualcomm and MediaTek to make anything quite like it, even with the same manufacturing nodes.

I think as jeffbee said below it's not even the custom ARM cores, but rather Apple's ability to control not only the hardware but the software on-top of it. In a typical Windows machine you are dealing with your CPU and microcode made by AMD/Intel/Other, then the BIOS/Driver code written by your motherboard manufacturer, and your GPU from either the on-board, or dGPU from Intel/Nvidia/AMD and then Windows made by Microsoft. All of this leads to silly things like the ASUS ACPI driver bug [1] or Dell [2]. Apple does not suffer from this lack of control and communication, instead allowing tight integration.

[1]: https://github.com/Zephkek/Asus-ROG-Aml-Deep-Dive

[2]: https://triangulatedexistence.mataroa.blog/blog/i-uncovered-...

Qualcomm is getting there with the Snapdragon X Elite.

It's still significantly slower than the M4 but you can at least meaningfully compare them nowadays which is a strong come back from where they were when the M1 was introduced.

We are likely to see improvements now that Microsoft buys Arm chips for their Surface laptops. I guess it was hard to justify the investment before.