Why don’t you think the M2 will increase clock speed?
And the problem with the M1 isn’t performance, single core is already off the charts. The M2 is going to provide 32Gb and 64Gb systems with up to four thunderbolt/USB4 ports and support for dual 6K monitors.
I doubt that the M1 or M2 is going to have superior single core performance to the upcoming Zen4/5nm laptop chips.
Let alone multicore performance. Apple's core are also far behind in IO, 64GB of RAM and 4x Thunderbolt is less than what current gen laptop chips can do.
I agree that Zen4 should be comparable, but it also will cost 4X to make, and more to implement since it doesn’t include RAM.
The M1 is a system on a chip, with all the benefits and drawbacks of that including RAM and port limits.
The next releases will likely be
A) a tweaked M1 for higher end PowerBooks with more RAM and ports and
B) a desktop version with plenty of ports, significantly higher clock speeds, and off chip RAM.
I think there will always be faster CPUs out there, but not remotely near the M series in power per watt, and cost per power.
Zen is also an SoC, but with off-chip memory, this brings other advantages.
Most importantly, Zen 4 is a chiplet design, so for the same amount of cores it will be cheaper to make than the M1 chip.
As for performance per watt, Renoir in low power configurations matches the A12. I would really doubt that a laptop Zen 4 on 5nm LPP wouldn't pass the M1/M2 in both performance and performance per watt, because Renoir is on 7nm with an older uArch and gets close.
> but IPC is going to be exactly the same.
I am not sure what you mean with this?