Guess we'll see (maybe) in December (Snapdragon 875 will be announced December 1st at Qualcomms Digital Summit) - or a bit later, but the 875, now also on 5nm, supposedly will be quite a bump. Leaked (supposed) benchmarks show 30%+ improvement, which would be A14 territory.

I also have my doubts, but would be great for the market. (New Exynos 2100 supposedly also being up there.)

A 30% improvement to the 865+ starts getting close to A13 single-threaded performance, on 7nm from a year ago.

So Qualcomm won't be quite so far behind Apple, but it's still pretty significant.

Sure, more interesting than just pure CPU performance will be improvements to GPU, image processing, ML and others though - at least in my eyes.

If we'll just look at geekbench's single core bench, I'm sure Apple will still lead. (And overall likely still produce the better chips.)

Qualcomm chips don't have on-chip DRAM at the highest clock rate possible. If they did the same things Apple is doing in that way, the performance advantage of M1 shrinks. There's no real "magic" in the M1 or Apple, it's a reality distortion field that is hitting everyone right now. It's entirely possible to outperform the M1, there just hasn't been a need to do that until now - no major OS would have benefitted from an ARM on steroids before now so there wasn't even a need for it.