Apple has the best silicon team in the world. They choose perf per watt over pure perf, which means they don't win on multi-core, but they're simply the best in the world in the most complicated, difficult, and impossible metric to game: single core perf.
Even when they were new, they competed with AMD's high end desktop chips. Many years later, they're still excellent in the laptop power range - but not in the desktop power range, where chips with a lot of cache match it in single core performance and obliterate it in multicore.
https://www.cpu-monkey.com/en/compare_cpu-apple_m4-vs-amd_ry...
Why does it matter how they achieved their thunderous performance? Why must it be diminished to just a boatload of cache? Does it matter from which implementation detail you got the best single-core performance in the world? If it's just way more cache, why isn't Intel just cranking up the cache?
And in laptop form compared with a m4 max: https://www.cpu-monkey.com/en/compare_cpu-apple_m4_max_14_cp...
That was Fujitsu. They each have their own specialties.