That’s where they started, but their conclusion was beyond that.

Did you miss the part where they said the fact that a single Firestorm core can almost saturate the memory controllers is astounding and something we’ve never seen in a design before?

This isn’t only about A14 vs M1.

It’s not that LPDDR4X-4266-class memory is special; it’s been around for a while. What is special is that the RAM is part of SoC and due to the unified memory model, the CPU, GPU, Neural Engine and the other units have very fast access to the memory.

This is common for tablets and smartphones; it’s not common for general purpose laptops and desktops. And while Intel and AMD have added more functionality to their processors, they don’t have everything that’s part of the M1 system on a chip:

* Image Processing Unit (ISP) * Digital Signal Processor (DSP) * 16 core Neural Processing Unit (NPU) * Video encoder/decoder * Secure Enclave

There’s no other desktop such as the M1 Mac mini that combines all of these features with this level of performance at the price point of $699.

That is special.