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Comment by janmo | Hacker News Reader

It has nothing to do with their architecture. Here are the facts:

The M1 is a 5nm chip, while the i9 is a 14nm chip! The M1 has about 16b transistor, the i9 has only about half of that amount.

No surprise the M1 is faster. Most credit should go to TSMC for being able to manufacture 5nm chips.

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> It has nothing to do with their architecture.

That it has zero to do with the architecture is a bold assertion (and seems unlikely).

In any event Apple would not have been able to manufacture / buy an x86 on 5nm so the architecture has quite a lot of influence on the performance of the latest Apple laptops.

I made the following thought experiment. If we downscale the M1 to a 8b transistor chip and make it use 14nm technology, would it still be faster than an i9 chip? I don't think so.

I think so. 3900X has 9.89b transistors and it is still faster than the i9.

Problem is your thought experiment doesn't work because you've ignored:

- The TDP of the M1 and the i9

- How each has utilised die area (e.g how much is devoted to CPU / GPU and accelerators)

When we see the version of the M1 for the larger MacBook Pros then the gap will become even bigger.

This... isn't a fact. It's the opposite from what I've read - the architecture is just as important as the smaller nm process.

This post is good reading on the matter: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25257932

I really doubt the M1 would perform nearly as good if it was a 14nm chip with 8b transistors.

The nanometer process is not an actual standard. So it's apples and oranges to compare two fabs

You are right, there different ways to measure transistors, but if I recall it correctly this should not account for more than 20 or 30% difference.

of course, but no matter the standards, TSMC 5nm is significantly smaller (and efficienter) than Intel 14nm.

The surprising fact is that M1 in a 999$ MBA can beat a 3000$+ MBP 16”, or get near the performance of a desktop CPU that cost ~400$.

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