1. They took all the different chips and crammed more of them onto one chip. Now the different parts of the computer can talk to each other faster without any more work.

2. The new chip does lots of little things waaaay faster than the old chip does a handful of big things.

3. Apple figured out how to do a lot more things before they need to. Like if you did all of the math problems in your textbook ahead of time and then when the teacher eventually gives you the assignment you hand in the ones they asked for.

The processor looks at the future instructions it will run, can see that some things can be run ahead of time, and can run multiple multiple instructions in parallel (on the same core). You could run individual multiplications in parallel. Most of those things other ARM processors can do that too, but M1 is bigger in some of those sizes, like how many instructions ahead it looks at, how many things can run at once etc.

Which other ARM chips are you comparing with? It’s not much faster than A14, Apple’s other ARM chip. Which in turn is around 20-30% faster than A13, etc. Apple has been making their ARM chips faster very gradually over the last 8 years. M1 is just the first one they’ve put in a computer and more people are paying attention to their speed.

Far from "like I'm 5", but here is a technical explanation: https://debugger.medium.com/why-is-apples-m1-chip-so-fast-32...

Isn't it because it is a SoC?

I found the following article enlightening:

https://screenrant.com/apple-silicon-m1-mac-macbook-chip-soc...

Edit: ignore that previous link, way better is the one mentioned by another poster:

https://debugger.medium.com/why-is-apples-m1-chip-so-fast-32...