M1 machines with 16 GB of RAM do not seem to be available yet, but benchmarks comparing an 8 GB M1 to a 32 GB i7 Mac seem to favor the M1 for the most part -- with far lower power consumption, heat, and noise.

I had just about given up on Apple's technical R & D, but they have hit this one out of the park. Close to twice the performance at half the price.

For a while, performance improvements at Intel and AMD have relied on incremental manufacturing and architectural upgrades with an ever increasing growth in power consumption. By committing to ARM and the system on a chip approach Apple has focused chip architecture on real-world computing and graphics usage patterns. It's a game changer.