> 4 of the cores on the M1 are efficiency cores and are very low performance (but sufficient performance, at incredible efficiency, for a lot of casual ongoing background things).
I think you're underselling the small cores a bit. Their microarchitecture is roughly comparable to a Cortex-A75, which was the high-performance cores in Snapdragon 845 phones like the Samsung Galaxy S9. But Apple clocks them about 26% slower than the SD845 did, so maybe we should be comparing against Galaxy S8 instead: flagship Android performance from 3 years ago. That's capable of a lot more than just casual background processing. Samsung introduced their DeX docking station for smartphone-powered desktop usage back with the S8 generation, when their phones only had as much computational power as the Apple M1's smaller cores.
Pulling other cores into this discussion does nothing but muddy the waters.
The Firestorm cores in the M1 are 4.5X faster at SPECfp than the Icestorm cores. The Firestorm cores in the M1 are 3.1X faster at SPECint than the Icestorm cores.
In my world, the 3.1 - 4.5X faster sibling makes them very low performance, relatively. In a fully working together scenario, the "8" core M1 is equal in performance to a conceptual 4.5 core Firestorm part (see the Geekbench scaling, for instance). This, again, has positively nothing to do with any other core or part.
Bizarre that anyone thinks this is somehow negative or dismissive of the M1. It is an extraordinary chip. But they intentionally, purposefully put 4 very low performance -- compared to Firestorm -- cores because it matches the computing model of users average workload.
I think you're underselling the small cores a bit. Their microarchitecture is roughly comparable to a Cortex-A75, which was the high-performance cores in Snapdragon 845 phones like the Samsung Galaxy S9. But Apple clocks them about 26% slower than the SD845 did, so maybe we should be comparing against Galaxy S8 instead: flagship Android performance from 3 years ago. That's capable of a lot more than just casual background processing. Samsung introduced their DeX docking station for smartphone-powered desktop usage back with the S8 generation, when their phones only had as much computational power as the Apple M1's smaller cores.