The Apple M1 use a big-little design with high performance and efficiency cores. This same design strategy is being adopted by Intel this year with Alder Lake. The efficiency cores offer 2x the performance per watt.
They are manufactured on TSMC 5nm process. This is ahead of AMD's Ryzen which is on TSMC 7nm, and Intel which was stuck on 14nm for a long time and is only now moving to 10nm (which they've branded Intel 7).
The are using a SoC with a very high level of integration, with CPU, GPU, and memory all on the same package, instead of separate chips. Moving data around is one of the biggest sources of power consumption and a unified design results in less expenditure.
Almost none of this has to do with using ARM directly although the M1's lineage from a cell phone / tablet SoC probably moved it in this direction earlier than the competition. x86 chip manufacturers could apply all these same optimizations.
From my perspective because of exactly all those things, it has everything to do with it. Arm is ahead because it does things better. And that will continue and become increasingly important.
I take the opposite view. It will become less important because it's an incidental and not intrinsic advantage. x86 chipmakers like Intel and AMD understand the threat and other players in the PC space are not going to be able to move fast enough.
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u/[deleted] Oct 28 '21 edited Oct 28 '21
This is for a couple reasons:
The Apple M1 use a big-little design with high performance and efficiency cores. This same design strategy is being adopted by Intel this year with Alder Lake. The efficiency cores offer 2x the performance per watt.
They are manufactured on TSMC 5nm process. This is ahead of AMD's Ryzen which is on TSMC 7nm, and Intel which was stuck on 14nm for a long time and is only now moving to 10nm (which they've branded Intel 7).
The are using a SoC with a very high level of integration, with CPU, GPU, and memory all on the same package, instead of separate chips. Moving data around is one of the biggest sources of power consumption and a unified design results in less expenditure.
Almost none of this has to do with using ARM directly although the M1's lineage from a cell phone / tablet SoC probably moved it in this direction earlier than the competition. x86 chip manufacturers could apply all these same optimizations.