The real breakthrough will be when another chipmaker can come anywhere close to the M1. Nothing on the ARM, Qualcomm, or MediaTek roadmap is even close. The Cortex X is a baby step in the direction of the M1, but the M1’s architectural advantages (gigantic memory bandwidth, 8-way decode, re-order buffers twice as deep, specialized instructions for x86 translation and reference counting atomics, and so on) remain untouched.
Hopefully this lights a fire under some of the other chipmakers and they’ll adjust course, but we’ll see.
In the meantime, it’s almost embarrassing for the rest of the industry just how far ahead Apple’s chips are. It’s been that way in smartphones for a long time now, and now it’s coming to laptops and desktops.
Hopefully this lights a fire under some of the other chipmakers and they’ll adjust course, but we’ll see.
In the meantime, it’s almost embarrassing for the rest of the industry just how far ahead Apple’s chips are. It’s been that way in smartphones for a long time now, and now it’s coming to laptops and desktops.