Note that while people here are gushing over performance, it's worth mentioning that you need to run ARM64 virtualized OSes (both Windows and Linux) for it to work.
Getting Intel x64/x86 VMs to work is... fun and they don't perform nearly as well as you'd expect from the gushing praise.
So double check if your virtualization use-case actually is fine with running ARM guests.
That sounds like they’re running x86 containers. I use Podman amd it’s very fast with ARM but notably slower when emulating x86 and there’s at least one case where this hit a JVM race condition in some old vendor code which still uses JDK8.
I'm using vmware fusion to run ubuntu vms for my daily work. The virtualized 20.04 aarch64 is on par with my x64 desktop (5900x from amd). Surprisingly in both, ST and MT loads. The laptop never runs out of juice at the end of the day when I'm on battery. Also there's no perf. penalty for disconnecting the charger.
Pretty good but note the M1 chip does not support nested virtualization. So you can run Windows/ARM but you can't run Docker, VMWARE or VirtualBox inside that.
Getting Intel x64/x86 VMs to work is... fun and they don't perform nearly as well as you'd expect from the gushing praise.
So double check if your virtualization use-case actually is fine with running ARM guests.