I find it great news that a bottom line CPU from intel offers this kind of acceptable performance, for what it is. This gives an idea of how good the next gen, from both camps, will be. But I would like to see good, fast SoCs with HSA/UMA architecture from both teams. Apple showed us all that there's a lot of potential in that area and such chips should not necessarily cost an arm and a leg.
I tink UMA might be the way to go for future laptops & desktops but not by much: I know that M1 is ahead of both AMD and Intel in terms of performance and battery but honestly, not by that much.
That is to say yes: what Apple is doing wins out in performance but the software side is doing quite a bit of heavy lifting. When there's no software magic sauce going on we see the M1 just do ok vs the x86 counterparts.
So on the x86 side I can tell you that it's popular
because there isn't a single solution for everything. The flexibility is what propelled the platform forward and kept it there for decades.
What needs to happen is that flexibility is translated to greater and greater advances but again, in the
software side of it mainly through virtualization: We are already seeing core density and transfers speeds for component reach the levels of "If you need hardware flexibility, generate that on a virtual machine not on physical hardware" as a viable proposition.
So once more and more of that transition is moved over to "the cloud" (Because I believe it will happen, regardless of whenever it's a good idea or not, simply because people with money are investing heavily on it) then solutions like the one Apple has with a UMA SoC will become the norm and very likely something on the x86 side will be done to try to compete: Not sure if it will be Google with ChromeOS, another Linux based solution that really works like an appliance OS (Think Android but targeted for x86 thin client pcs) or maybe even Microsoft (Although they failed at it so many times and are still so invested with the recent release of Windows 11 they probably won't win out)