I've seen things like this a lot, and it's a bit confusing. If parts of the M1's performance are due to throwing compute at the problem, why hasn't Intel been doing that for years? What about ARM, or the M1, allowed this to happen?
Intel has. Many M1 design choices are fairly typical for desktop x86 chips, but unheard of with ARM.
For example, the M1 has 128 bit wide memory. This has been standard for decades on the desktop(dual channel), but unheard of in cellphones. The M1 also has similar amounts of cache to the new AMD and Intel chips, but thats several times more than the latest snapdragon. Qualcomm also doesn't just design for the latest node. Most of their volume is on cheaper, less dense nodes.
So from this (and some other places), it kind of seems like ARM has been competitive for a long time, but for power and temperature saving its been fighting with one hand behind its back. That's intriguing in its own right, but I'm still confused as to what the actual differences are. Like the M1 runs as fast as current gen x86 processors, while running cooler. How?
> Like the M1 runs as fast as current gen x86 processors, while running cooler. How?
The M1 is one "node" ahead. Apple forked out the cash to get all their chips on TSMC's 5nm process. This is about 2 years of advancement over the 7nm process AMD pays TSMC for. Intel's latest 10nm node is similarly behind TSMC 5nm.
Semiconductors are tricky. Small performance gains take large increases in power. If you play with overclocking, you'll learn power increases quadratically or even cubically with clocks. The mere "2nm" shrink may seem inconsequential, but for these iso-perfomance comparisons(performance@constant-thermals), it is key.
All this to say, you get what you pay for. Chips can get the same performance on TSMC's 5nm node while using 70% of the power as chips on the 7nm node.[1] Compared to TSMC's 10nm (similar to Intel's popular 14nm still in production), 5nm chips can be expected to use ~45% of the power.
Hopefully that shed some light on the M1's biggest advantage for you.
Buying the majority of TSMC's 5nm process output helped. It's a combination of good engineering, the most advanced process, and intel shitting themselves I would say.
