It’s also very wide and has a big reorder buffer so ‘just slapping 16 gigs’ of cache probably isn’t the answer.
"has a big reorder buffer", I'm interpreting this as "one of the notable advantages of the M1 is it's ability to be more clever about processing instructions out of order to maximize resource utilization". Is that about right?
If you’re really interested in this it might be worth finding a copy of the Patterson and Hennessy book. It’s a big read and expensive (but older versions are on the internet archive [1]) and covers all these design issues in quite a lot of detail.
[1] https://archive.org/details/ComputerArchitectureAQuantitativ...