> This is the first time in decades that we see a serious non-x86 competitor for general purpose consumer-level computing. This is significant in and of itself.
I feel like this would be a lot more significant if you could buy the chip on its own. When you can only buy it as part of a Mac, you're really not buying the chip, you're buying a Mac with all that entails. Then who makes the chip in your Mac doesn't really change much because you buy it from Apple either way.
> Power consumption. These things seem to consume 2/3rds as many watts to offer the same performance levels than their x86 counterparts. This is big in the laptop space.
But that's much the same issue where you're comparing it to Zen 2 when Zen 3 is expected to be 20% faster at the same power, and close a lot of that gap.
It's also hard to compare this in general, for two reasons. The first is that the M1 is 5nm, so then the question is how much of the efficiency is due to that (and will accrue to AMD next year) and how much, if any, is the design?
And the second is that the M1 is big.LITTLE. The small cores are more power efficient, so when you average them in, the overall result should be more power efficient than entirely big cores. But x86-64 processors with a similar configuration are sparse, so what do you compare to? It will be interesting to see the result when there are some (both Intel and AMD have some planned).