Intel got criticized for minor improvements year after year. It's important to look at these on 5+ year timescales, since the improvements aren't evenly spread out. Especially since gains often depend on manufacturing process improvements.
Those are all Skylake CPUs with very minor tweaks. The biggest change being clock frequencies steadily increasing due to 14 nm evolving into the ultra-mature 14+++ nm process.
Actually the reason why Intel got criticized is not that their improvements were minor because Intel could not do better than that.
When studying the evolution of Intel CPUs over many years, it is obvious that most of the time they could have done greater improvements, but as long as their competition was weak they delayed the improvements that they could have done in a single year over 2 or 3 yearly CPU generations, in order to minimize their manufacturing costs, therefore maximizing their profits.
Only during the many years that have passed between Skylake and Alder Lake, Intel was no longer able to implement all the improvements that they would have wanted, due to the failures in the development of the new CMOS processes, so they were forced to make random minor improvements because greater improvements were impossible and they did not have a good Plan B as an alternative to the erroneous Plan A, which was every year that the next year will be the year when the Intel "10 nm" CMOS process will become competitive.
Yeah, I'm not personally surprised by there not a massive jump in an 18 month span.
It looks as though Apple are gearing up for armv9 and smaller process node for the next round of chips which would be more of the "large jump" people are expecting. I think as long as Apple alternate the big jumps with the small jumps then they're not doing anything different from anyone else.
They needed to deliver M2 to show they're not resting on their laurels. If M3 is a similar kind of improvement then that's when to be worried.
I would agree. Third times the charm an all that. Looking at AMD, with Zen 1 that was a huge leap but their second generation Zen+ was quite small in comparison. Zen 2 showed the path forward and Zen 3 showed they could continue to deliver performance with their methods. I would hold Apple Silicon to the same test (as well as Intel’s dedicated GPUs), M3 or whatever the third iteration is will be the true test of Apple’s vision.
