I'm just pointing out that people are making these comparisons because Apple themselves did it first.

This is slightly disingenuous—I think most people know they meant the design of their cores are faster than any other core, GHz for GHz. They didn't say "the M1 is faster than any other processor out there".

The 5800X runs at 3.7 GHz, peaking at 4.8 GHz with all 8 cores.

The M1 runs at 3.2 GHz and 4 of the cores are low-power cores. Of course the 5800X is faster; this shouldn't be a surprise.

However, as the AnandTech review has pointed out with their benchmarks, if the M1 ran at the same speed as AMD's processors, the M1 would be faster. That's what Apple implied with the "world's fastest core" thing. Even now, the M1 has 8 vs. AMD's 4 instruction decoders, allowing it to process more instructions per clock cycle, with faster RAM.

They have cranked-up M1's in the lab running at faster speeds that they've benchmarked, so they know what they said is true--even if they can't say how they know yet.

The proper way to understand Apple-speak is "even though the M1 is an entry-level chip, it's more than competitive with Intel and AMD's newest chips at a fraction of the power and heat. Wait until we crank up the speed and add more performance cores in future products to see what they can really do."