This is Apple's first non-mobile chip ever. You think this is the best they can do, ever?
They have been making mobile ARM chips for quite some time, so it's not like they are inexperienced.
Short, wide architectures are historically harder to frequency scale (and given how power vs clocks tapers off at the end of that scale, it's not a bad thing IMO).
4nm isn't shipping until 2022 (and isn't a full node). TSMC says that the 5 to 3nm change will be identical to the 7 to 5nm change (+15% performance or -30% power consumption).
Any changes next year will have to come through pure architecture changes or bigger chips. I'm betting on more modest 5-10% improvements on the low-end and larger 10-20% improvements on a larger chip with a bunch of cache tweaks and higher TDP.
Intel 10nm+ "SuperFin" will probably be fixing the major problems, improving performance, and slightly decreasing sizes for a final architecture much closer to TSMC N7.
I'm thinking that AMD ships their mobile chips with N6 instead of N7 for the density and mild power savings (it's supposedly a minor change and the mobile design is a separate chip anyway). Late next year we should be seeing Zen 4 on 5nm. That should be an interesting situation and will help resolve any questions of process vs architecture.
That said, it's an amazing notebook CPU.
> Although it's extremely difficult to get accurate Apples-to-non-Apples benchmarks on this new architecture, I feel confident in saying that this truly is a world-leading design—you can get faster raw CPU performance, but only on power-is-no-object desktop or server CPUs. Similarly, you can beat the M1's GPU with high-end Nvidia or Radeon desktop cards—but only at a massive disparity in power, physical size, and heat.
...So, given that, and assuming that Apple will attempt to compete with them, I think it likely that they will, at the very least, be able to match them on even footing, when freed from the constraints of size, heat, and power that are relevant to notebook chips.
[0] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/11/hands-on-with-the-ap...
Nvidia has been making ARM SoCs since 2008. They have been used in cars, tablets, phones, and entertainment systems.
What do you think powers the Nintendo Switch?
I meant that NVIDIA will start producing ARM CPUs optimized for peak data-center performance, similar to how they now have CUDA accelerator cards for data centers, which are starting to diverge from desktop GPUs.
In the past, NVIDIA's ARM division mostly focussed on mobile SoCs. Now that Graviton and M1 are here, I'd expect NVIDIA to also produce high-wattage ARM CPUs.