Unlike what has been said on Twitter the answer to why the M1 is fast isn’t due to technical tricks, but due to Apple throwing a lot of hardware at the problem.
The M1 is really wide (8 wide decode) and has a lot of execution units. It has a huge 630 deep reorder buffer to keep them all filled, multiple large caches and a lot of memory bandwidth.
It is just a monster of a chip, well designed balanced and executed.
BTW this isn’t really new. Apple has been making incremental progress year by year on these processor for their A-series chips. Just nobody believed those Geekbench benchmarks showing that in short benchmarks your phone could be faster than your laptop. Well turns out that given the right cooling solution those benchmarks were accurate.
Anandtech has a wonderful deep dive into the processor architecture.
https://www.anandtech.com/show/16226/apple-silicon-m1-a14-de...
Edit: I didn’t mean to disparage Apple or the M1 by saying that Apple threw hardware at the problem. That Apple was able to keep power low with such a wide chip is extremely impressive and speaks to how finely tuned the chip is. I was trying to say that Apple got the results they did the hard way by advancing every aspect of the chip.
The M1 is really wide (8 wide decode) and has a lot of execution units. It has a huge 630 deep reorder buffer to keep them all filled, multiple large caches and a lot of memory bandwidth.
It is just a monster of a chip, well designed balanced and executed.
BTW this isn’t really new. Apple has been making incremental progress year by year on these processor for their A-series chips. Just nobody believed those Geekbench benchmarks showing that in short benchmarks your phone could be faster than your laptop. Well turns out that given the right cooling solution those benchmarks were accurate.
Anandtech has a wonderful deep dive into the processor architecture.
https://www.anandtech.com/show/16226/apple-silicon-m1-a14-de...
Edit: I didn’t mean to disparage Apple or the M1 by saying that Apple threw hardware at the problem. That Apple was able to keep power low with such a wide chip is extremely impressive and speaks to how finely tuned the chip is. I was trying to say that Apple got the results they did the hard way by advancing every aspect of the chip.