Additionally, M1 is currently best? platform when comparing performance with power usage, and (at least MBA) comes in a great form factor. AFAIK there is no comparable device that has decent support for Linux.
No, M1 is clearly slower in multi-core (to be fair, it has fewer threads). Not sure where you got your numbers from. 5900HX gets about 7800 in Geekbench 5, and the difference is much larger in some other multi-core tests. For example Cinebench gives 7800 for M1, 13800 for 5900HX.
