What technically allows the M1 to perform better?

Question

I'm flabbergasted that Intel and AMD have failed so utterly and completely in every respect. These are huge companies with half a century of lead time and they're now years behind Apple's M1.There's a lot of speculation about why the M1 is faster. What's the actual answer? It can't just be the ISA, the M1 performs superbly when running x86-64 code too. What does the M1 do chip-design-wise that Intel and AMD failed to do for their chips?

ThePhysicist · Accepted Answer

Most of it is due to Apple using a more modern fabrication process with smaller structures (5nm). Some of it is due to optimizations like having efficiency cores that can handle non-demanding workloads with less energy consumption than the regular cores. I expect Intel & AMD chips to quickly catch up once they switch to more modern processes as well. Currently Intel still uses a 14 nm process for their Coffee Lake processors, so no matter how good their design might be they just can't compete with a chip that's built using a 5nm process, as the physical characteristics are completely different.

getcrunk · Answer

The m1 had the "luxury" of being able to be made from the ground up relatively speaking using modern knowledge.
If you consider the case of Intel/and and x86 imagine a building with one story and every year they had to add a story to it. That iterative improvement added some cruft and they also didn't have the option to rebuild from scratch.
Apple has great minds working on the m1 and alot of resources and I'm sure they've made unique accomplishments but the biggest thing is that I think.

majormunky · Answer

I think part of it is having chip people being able to work closely with the people writing software for it. I remember something about the M1 chip being able to do simple things like releasing an object and it taking much less time than on x86 as an example. https://twitter.com/catfish_man/status/1326238434235568128?s...

mardiyah · Answer

https://www.cpu-monkey.com/en/compare_cpu-apple_m1-1804-vs-a...who said? depends on target performance