Another example - M1s can't do SMT, no one is denying that they are good chips but there's a lot of catching up for them to do.
> And all of the M1 Macs have blazingly fast memory access. Remember, it's an SoC—the memory is on the same die as the CPUs, GPUs and they all have equal access to it. No bus to go across.
What does this even mean? Memory works at a certain voltage, clock speed, and has a capped rate at which it can transfer data if those are kept constant. For DDR4-3200 it's generally 3,200 MTs (megatransfers/sec).
What does every core has equal access to it mean? What does soldering SDRAM change in terms how many transfers/sec it can do? What do you mean there is no bus?
> The M1 already has features no "desktop" chip has, such as 8 instruction decoders.
What makes going wide a "desktop" class feature? Going wide isn't free, there is transistor cost associated. A M1 chip has 16 billion transistors for 8 cores. AMD's EPYC Rome has 39.54 billion transistors for 64 cores. That's 8 times as many cores. And that's including ~9 billion transistors just for the I/O die.
If you look at just the chiplets, AMD's 8 Core complexes take up only 3.9 billion transistors each. And these are 8 high performance cores with SMT, even removing GPU/NPU engines from M1, AMDs design clearly has a lower transistor cost.
> The Zen3 barely beats the M1
AMD was't trying to make an entry level laptop chip, so it's not good at being a entry level laptop chip? How do you think M1 would fare if we try to compare them on datacenter CPU metrics?
I understand why everyone is excited, but they aren't looking at the whole picture.