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Apple has played the M1 game so damn well it's really hard to tease out the core performance improvements. Still hoping someone does a deep dive into instruction timings, memory bandwidth, latencies, energy usage, etc.
Right now everyone is drooling over insane battery life (how much of that is perf/W and how much of that is power management improvements?), things like glitchless resolution switching (I think many modern GPU pipes can do that... if your drivers are up to par)
Things like unified memory (already a thing on x86 game consoles for 2 generations, e.g. PS4, even though legacy PC drivers on the same hardware have trouble doing it properly).
I've even heard a claim that "the M1 uses less RAM because object acquire/release is faster" going through some nonsense comparison with Android/GC-based systems which, uh, no? macOS has always used reference counting, this just means it's faster, it doesn't use less RAM.
Then Apple also bought their way to being first to 5nm, so that instantly gives them another perf/power boost over the competition (decent leg up on AMD and Intel is left way behind), so that's another confounding factor.
Rosetta 2 is somehow simultaneously amazing new translation technology (it isn't, it's just a really good JIT emulator) but also proof that the M1 is insane because it can beat previous Intel chips Apple used for that range under emulation...
The M1 GPU looks really interesting too, but what can it really do? Apple's architecture derives from the mobile tile-based world, that's very different from typical PC stuff. Is it better at some things and worse at others?
Obviously Apple pulled a lot from their software/drivers from the iOS space, which have had years to mature and be optimized (and Apple has put a *lot* of work into that, while GPU drivers are historically vendor-provided and almost universally suck).
The M1 Mac release is just such a huge pile of little improvements *all around*, some of which would be almost certainly possible on previous x86 chips too, that it's really hard to get at the details. I hope someone does.
Just remember, there's no such thing as magic. There's good engineering, and there's *caring*. The former is often hard to come across these days, and the latter is, well, increasingly rare.
Apple has managed to find a bunch of both for the M1 Macs, and it shows.
Apple has managed to find a bunch of both for the M1 Macs, and it shows.
