The M1 processor is a direct result of the death of Moore's law. It's an amazing processor, but a sad sign of things to come.
The performance gains from Moore's law have typically come from shrinking die size. That has ended, you can't juice more performance from general purpose CPUs. If general purpose processors no longer advance quickly enough, the only way to get performance gains is to build custom chips for common specific tasks. That's what we're seeing now with the M1. The M1 buys us a few more years of exponential-appearing performance gains, but it's a one-trick pony. You can turn code into an ASIC once, but after that, your performance is at the mercy of the foundry and physics.
The death of Moore's law has many consequences, the rise of ASICs and custom co-processor chips is just one of them.
The performance gains from Moore's law have typically come from shrinking die size. That has ended, you can't juice more performance from general purpose CPUs. If general purpose processors no longer advance quickly enough, the only way to get performance gains is to build custom chips for common specific tasks. That's what we're seeing now with the M1. The M1 buys us a few more years of exponential-appearing performance gains, but it's a one-trick pony. You can turn code into an ASIC once, but after that, your performance is at the mercy of the foundry and physics.
The death of Moore's law has many consequences, the rise of ASICs and custom co-processor chips is just one of them.