Apple Silicon M1 chip in MacBook Air outperforms high-end 16-inch MacBook Pro

What's actually more interesting to me than Intel vs ARM is how much further ahead Apple is vs the competition. The snapdragon 8cx is about 1/3rd the speed in both Single and Multicore performance of the M1.

How is Apple so far ahead even with the same instruction set?

Probably has something to do with the 5nm process.

How certain can one be that the M1 uses nothing but the ARM instruction set? They certainly aren't advertising it as ARM. They aren't selling it to other OEMs. One way to really put the kabash on Hackintoshes would be to make Mac OS use nonstandard instructions. What's to keep them from adding instructions?

It’s what happens when a trillion dollar company does vertical integration the right way instead of dicking around.

Intel, Qualcomm, Microsoft - all have to build products that work for the lowest common denominator. Loss of focus is a major problem.

Apple has a handful of products. One OS. One developer platform.

This kind of agility is extremely powerful. They can switch fabs whenever it makes sense. They can switch ISAs whenever it makes sense.

Contrast with Microsoft, that has to support so many hardware platforms. They’re not helping themselves with so many software frameworks - Win32, WinRT, .NET, MFC, WinJs? I’ve lost count.

Intel is handicapped stuck to their process nodes.

Qualcomm, while they’ve effectively captured the mobile SOC market, they too have the same problem. They can’t control what handset makers do. So they can only go so far.

Apple can make a single CPU core and mix and match that with variations. Things get a lot easier if you just have to deal with yourself e2e - even as far as retail sales.

ARM laptops have been trapped in a vicious cycle of low performance -> low sales -> low R&D -> low performance. The A78C and X1 cores should help a lot but they still won't match Apple Silicon.

Apple is ahead because they have more money than Arm, Qualcomm, Samsung, etc. combined.

Qualcomm and Samsung have access to 5nm.

How big one's pocket isn't usually the driving factor on who does best.

This feels like once again Apple is 5 years ahead of competition just like when iPhone came out.

> How is Apple so far ahead even with the same instruction set?

Single customer. Apple can optimize directly for iOS workload and consider nothing else.

Intel sells into the general market and has to hit sometimes conflicting goals so that Dell, HP, Lenovo, etc. will all buy their chip.

It might not be the usual driving factor but deep pockets are a powerful tool in the hands of people who know what they are doing, and friction for those who don’t have them.

Nothing, and the chip does have a handful of proprietary instructions. But for the most part it's just standard ARMv8.5, which you can see because it runs ARM binaries generated using a standard compiler toolchain.

QCom focuses their capital on handsets. They could likely compete with Apple design, but they wouldn’t have a market for years. Also, they’d be competing as a commodity against Intel, AMD and AMLogic. In the semi industry, it’s not a good bet to invest only to become a 2nd source that eats into everyone’s margin.

Apple is a vertical. They own their market, so the investment has more predictable returns.

They have incubated this chip arch in their iPhones for five years!

I did some more research after commenting and found that while surely the 5nm transistors help this processor to run cool and stable, it's the packaging that really brings the speed. Everything being integrated right there means less latency, which likely means less need for caching, less stuff stuck waiting in RAM, etc.

I'm not a fan of Apple's domineering business strategies, but this SoC is impressive. I have to imagine AMD and Intel will follow up with something similar (a tightly integrated SoC aimed at higher performance applications).