What are you talking about? The last gen Macbook Air and Pro had Ice Lake chips with Iris Plus graphics, why would that be not a fair comparison? Sure, the Air did have a terrible cooling system, but so does the new Air. The 2020 4-port 13” Macbook Pro that still continues to be sold as they’re the only 13” Macbooks that can be configured with 4TB SSD and 32GB RAM as of now, has a 4-core Ice Lake that Apple literally push to its limits to squeeze every ounce of performance they can, if you watched a review or two covering that machine. Linus Tech Tips complained that it was running too hot — not thermal throttling, just going really fast. And the M1’s GPU is like 2-2.5x faster than even those machines’ iGPU.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_MUTS7xvKhQ&list=PLo11Rczpzu... Check this out, 12.5W power consumption for the M1 CPU vs. 68W CPU power consumption for the Intel i9 CPU of the 16” Macbook Pro, and yet the M1 is 8% faster in Cinebench R23 in multi-core score.
