While last Intel based and M1 Air share the essentially same chassis, there is huge dufference in the thermal management. In both cases it is obviously explicitly designed to not be able to cool the entire TDP of the SoC in question and intentionally cause thermal throttling (the reasoning behind that has to do with limiting the outside temperature of the whole device), but the overall design of the thermal solution is better in M1 MBA as this us done by just bolting bunch of thermal mass to the SoC, while there was no space to do that in x86 MBA which necessiated the weird design with actively cooled intentionally ineffective heatsink.
