It's quite clear how this "magic" is possible.
Weather you like it or not, the future is a "product on a chip". That includes everything: CPU, GPU, RAM, SSD, and assembly instructions for vendor-specific things like NSObject. This puts everything physically close together (efficient), eliminates all the protocol compatibility overhead (efficient), removes all the standards the company can't control (efficient).
The downside, of course, that this will be the ultimate vendor lock-in, which is hard to compete with, and can't be serviced by anyone else.
The upside is that the alternatives will always remain relevant.
It's not a sustainable model. Apple relies on the rest of the market being open and interoperable for their products to be useful (even the fastest computer is useless without content). If every competitor turns to monolithic solutions, they all lose.
Putting the CPU and RAM on the same die is absolutely not the future. Not only is it impossible to mix and match process technologies in that way, it would be extremely wasteful given the far greater numbers of metal layers on a CPU and the performance improvement would be marginal. The same is even more true with integrating CPU and NAND flash.
Pretty sure the M1 memory is not on the same die, just on the same "chip". You can see a separation in the teardowns and Apple's advertising materials don't show it on the die images.
Yeah I was wondering forever to how that were emulating x86 faster than native x86 its because they brought ram internal. But the ultimate black box is a better word than vendor lock-in. If they are gutting all the common stuff I wonder what dragons are lurking. Like this is the kind of design change that introduces something like meltdown in my opinion. Maybe MacOS can hide these things but there is definitely some hardware issues there its to many moving parts for it not to be.
