Hardware

M1 kinda was the “second coming of Christ” in regards to many efficiency metrics in the notebook space.

It’s idle efficiency and power usage doing tasks like local video playback, or Microsoft teams completely set a new bar for the likes of intel and AMD. Both of stem still haven’t matched the original M1 in those efficiency metrics.

They certainly caught up in performance metrics and perf/watt under load, but not in the “lowest power usage possible” metric.

Even Apples LPDDR memory PHY is more efficient than Intel or AMDs, because Apple is bigger than both of them and has THE best low-power engineers on the planet.

The CPU cores Apple makes are great, but they are quite large area wise and intel and AMD can compete pretty well at making a core.

Their SoCs are best in class however. When you set the bar that high with M1, there isn’t really all that much room to improve in the SoC, and what’s left are the cores themselves where Apple is going to be innovating similarly to AMD and Intel.

M1 was Apples equivalent to AMDs Zen1. A fresh start product where every low hanging fruit was implemented resulting in a massive gains over its predecessor.