When Apple announced that it would reject Intel in favor of its own, ARM-based laptop processors, the big question was how fast the computers would be with these new chips. In the latest installment of our Upscaled statement program, we looked at the performance of Apple’s new M1-powered Macbook Pro compared to an Intel-powered 16-inch Macbook Pro and the Windows ARM-based Surface Pro X. It turns out that the M1 is crazy fast.
The next question is how did Apple’s engineers do it? Processors are not magical. Each design is a balance between a dozen variables. A larger cache may hold more data, but it is slower to access. Higher clock speeds increase performance, but use battery life. This is further complicated by the fact that designing a chip can take years, but despite all the modeling and simulations that engineers have available, it can be difficult to predict exactly how a chip will perform until you actually manufacture it.
The key to Apple’s success seems to be the M1’s incredible ‘wide’ design. It refers to how many instructions the slide can process each cycle. While the M1 is single-threaded, meaning each core can process just one stream of instructions at a time (unlike Intel and AMD’s multi-threaded design), it can process as many as 8 instructions per cycle. This is almost twice as much as most modern designs. This still makes it do a lot of work, even when running at a lower clock speed, which can help save power.
It’s just one of a series of smart decisions Apple has made that all contribute to an impressive processor. Some see the benefit of the M1 because it’s an ARM chip, unlike x86 like Intel or AMD, but many of Apple’s design decisions are things that competing companies can accept (and get started on). Add to that that the M1 is built on a leading 5nm design from TSMC, and Apple’s success is not magic.
Watch the full video for even more details on Apple’s M1 design and how other companies are catching up.
You can see our list of sources for this piece here.