Of course M1's are perceived as being faster because:
- video camera encoding/decoding is offloaded to a dedicated processor;
- disk encryption is offloaded to a dedicated processor;
- rendering is offloaded to dedicated GPU's;
- matrix multiplication is offloaded to dedicated matrix multiplication processors (neural engines);
- no wasteful memory transfers (even though the memory bus is 2048 bit wide anyway) across dedicated processors.
Kind of like channel processors running channel programs in IBM mainframes, brought to a mainstream ultraportable laptop.
And, on top of that, the screen that drops the refresh rate by a factor of 6 when there is no need to refresh the picture too often.
Ironically, the CPU is left with pretty much one job to do: to compute. It is possible to get fast compilation times whilst doing all of the above at once. Or have an app that does all of the above at once, too (no, it won't save Microsoft Teams). And be power efficient, too; hence a long battery life and an Apple marketing team brouhaha: «We can do this all day». They are right – they can actually do all of that, and they can brag about it now because they have a full list from the above fulfilled.
System performance is a holistic matter, not just single/multicore comparisons oftetimes taken out of the context.
We already had dedicated GPUs for all the graphics/video stuff and the T2 chip for the disk encryption in the Intel Macs. That leaves the unified memory architecture as the only innovation.
Perception is key here.
Of course M1's are perceived as being faster because:
- video camera encoding/decoding is offloaded to a dedicated processor;
- disk encryption is offloaded to a dedicated processor;
- rendering is offloaded to dedicated GPU's;
- matrix multiplication is offloaded to dedicated matrix multiplication processors (neural engines);
- no wasteful memory transfers (even though the memory bus is 2048 bit wide anyway) across dedicated processors.
Kind of like channel processors running channel programs in IBM mainframes, brought to a mainstream ultraportable laptop.
And, on top of that, the screen that drops the refresh rate by a factor of 6 when there is no need to refresh the picture too often.
Ironically, the CPU is left with pretty much one job to do: to compute. It is possible to get fast compilation times whilst doing all of the above at once. Or have an app that does all of the above at once, too (no, it won't save Microsoft Teams). And be power efficient, too; hence a long battery life and an Apple marketing team brouhaha: «We can do this all day». They are right – they can actually do all of that, and they can brag about it now because they have a full list from the above fulfilled.
System performance is a holistic matter, not just single/multicore comparisons oftetimes taken out of the context.