Erik Engheim has a great write up on what makes Apple’s M1 chip so fast. It’s a bit technical, but if you’re interested in CPUs you’ll love it.
If you are one of those people, you have come to the right place. Here I plan to break it down into digestible pieces exactly what it is that Apple has done with the M1. Specifically the questions I think a lot of people have are:
1. What is the technical reasons this M1 chip is so fast?
2. Has Apple made some really exotic technical choices to make this possible?
3. How easy will it be for the competition such as Intel and AMD to pull the same technical tricks?
Sure you could try to Google this, but if you try to learn what Apple has done beyond the superficial explanations, you will quickly get buried in highly technical jargon such as M1 using very wide instruction decoders, enormous re-order buffer (ROB) etc. Unless you are a CPU hardware geek, a lot of this will simply be gobbledegook.
Erik Engheim