Not in raw performance, no, but they're only beat out by i9s and the like, which are very power hungry. If you care even a little bit about performance per watt, the M series are far superior.

Have a look at Geekbench's results.[1] Ignore the top ones, since they're invalid and almost certainly cheated (click to check). The iPads and such lower down are all legit, but the same goes for some of the i9s inbetween.

And honestly, the fact that you have to go up to power hungry desktop processors to even find something to compete with the chip that goes in an (admittedly high-end) iPad, is somewhat embarrassing on its face, and not for Apple.

https://browser.geekbench.com/v6/cpu/singlecore