How impressed should I be. In terms of Apples history of manufacturing chips compared to, say, intel. This is their 4th generation of the M chip and it seems to be so far ahead of intel, a company with significant bigger history of chip production.
They've been in the chip designing business for a while.
basically Jim Keller happened, I think they are still riding on that architecture
What does seem to be constant is that the best CPU designs have been touched by the hands of people who can trace their roots to North Eastern US. Maybe the correlation doesn't exist and the industry is small and incestuous enough that most designs are worked on by people from everywhere, but sometimes it seems like some group at DEC or Multiflow stumbled on the holy grail of CPU design and all took a drink from the cup.