Expect the tech press to hype it to the ends of the world. I think a few have shown benchmarks compared to desktop CPUs.However,what they convenient ignore is a few basic facts:
1.)Like all ARM based performance CPUs they HAVE to be on a cutting edge node,which masks the enormous amount of transistors they use at each generation.
2.)The M4 is basically a quad core with 4 lower power cores,but uses 16 billion transistors.
3.)Most of the benchmarks we have seen,appear to be lightly threaded ones too(so best case of maximum clockspeed boost).
4.)Also ignores that CPUs such as AMD Zen,use things such as IF which scale very well with more cores,but is a big part of the power budget of the CPU. The chiplets are designed to be scaleable to 100s of cores.
5.)Have much more IO capabilities unlike a laptop CPU,which does also required more transistors and more power.
6.)Still monolithic designs,unlike AMD who has realised new nodes are getting harder. AMD are prepared for this.
7.)Apple CPUs are tightly integrated with the OS which runs on them. You can see how even AMD and Intel CPUs can perform better under Linux for example.
A 16C Zen3 will probably use less transistors with two chiplets with 16C and 32 threads. Each Zen2 chiplet with 8C/16T is around 3.9 billion transistors. AMD Renoir is 9.8 billlion transistors and is an SOC.
So I would be utterly suprised if Apple is essentially making a 4C SOC with so many transistors on a cutting edge process,and they can't post very good single threaded and lightly threaded scores.