I thought the secret sauce to M1 was largely that it was a new architecture, without the decades of x86 backwards compatible baggage, with an OS and software capable of running natively on it?
Both, sort of. The secret sauce to M1 battery life is a combination of OS thread scheduling and efficiency cores. The secret sauce to M1 performance is having an architecture that doesn’t need to be thermal throttled as much as in other platforms.
It’s not that Apple invented chips that are remarkably faster than Intel’s or NVIDIA’s, it’s that Apple invented an integrated experience on this new architecture with split performance & efficiency cores and did so while maintaining backwards compatibility with macOS x86 apps in a way that’s indistinguishable from M1-native apps. (So they kept the “baggage” as it were, and it still performs fine.)
I expect Microsoft’s Surface line will catch up eventually, but the disconnect between Qualcomm/Intel as chip makers and Microsoft as OS vendor will slow down the transition for a good 4-6 years easy, and we’re 2 years into this transition to ultra-energy efficient architectures with less thermal throttling. (Full disclosure, I’ve a few Apple shares.)
It's quite close to the process AMD are on but not 5nm that apple use.
A lot of M1's advantage is in terms of density. That's why they were theoretically able to make such an absolutely enormous processor and keep it cool.
Making that theory work in practice came from decades of low power semi experience. They're extremely good chip designers.
The Alder Lake node is about equivalent to TSMC's N7, maybe 10% better. N5, the node Apple is using for M1, is about 1.8x the density of N7 with 40% lower power usage.
AMD and Intel are on similar nodes at the moment, but Apple has a very notable advantage. It's not "secret sauce" so much as paying many billions for exclusive access.
This is the biggest part of the 'sauce' but having E-cores and extremely close memory (faster memory access - less time the cores need to wait for data - less time spent doing nothing and burning watts) surely helps.
