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On Youtube I watched a Mac user who had bought an iMac last year. It was maxed out with 40 GB of RAM costing him about $4000. He watched in disbelief how his hyper expensive iMac was being demolished by his new M1 Mac Mini, which he had paid a measly $700 for.
In real world test after test, the M1 Macs are not merely inching past top of the line Intel Macs, they are destroying them. In disbelief people have started asking how on earth this is possible?
If you are one of those people, you have come to the right place. Here I plan to break it down into digestible pieces exactly what it is that Apple has done with the M1.
Related:
What Does RISC and CISC Mean in 2020?
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(Score: 3, Insightful) by shrewdsheep on Wednesday December 02 2020, @05:57PM
I agree with the floating point part.
Here, I am a bit more sceptical. Sure, some silicon is wasted to translate CISC instructions into the internal RISC representation, a build-in Rosetta, if you will. Most bottlenecks have been worked around by the introduction of new instructions in the past. As a result I would not expect a fresh architecture to perform radically better, let's say in the ballpark of 10% maybe, at least that would be my expectation. In this view, I find the apparent M1 performance amazing. As you say, RAM bandwidth is critical in many applications and probably much can be gained there. I am looking forward to a competent article disentangling RAM/IPC/IO performance for the M1.