this could be the last GREAT ARM chip
I mean how small can they make a processor?
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I would never buy a professional MAC with an ARM chip
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This. Is. Not. An. ARM. Chip.
ARM (Advanced RISC Machine) does several things but they don't make chips. At the high end they sell "reference designs" from which you can contract with a fab and have a CPU built for you.
At the lower end (where Apple is a customer) they provide an instruction set reference. From this Apple has, essentially from the ground up, designed not just a CPU, but an entire system on a chip including memory controllers, GPU, neural network, etc. I won't begin to list all the neato stuff Apple has crammed into this package.
According to the laws of physics, we could go smaller, the only really "hard" limit is the speed of light. At some point you simply cannot move information from one part of the chip to the other fast enough to not have delays. I think Apple's engineers are seeing this on the horizon and aren't trying to increase the single point performance (clock speed, single core performance) anywhere as much as they are starting to implement larger solutions that provide alternative processing solutions to real-world compute problems. They are, literally, designing a processing system. To solve complex real-world issues you could shrink and clock-up (massively on both counts) the primary CPU cores, and/or add more cores. Intel worked hard at this for years, look up the mhz wars. or, you could find better ways to improve FP math on the GPU and offload math the tolerates errors to that system, we've done this; probably in the middle of it on most platforms. Apple seems to be choosing route three: PGA and neural engines where the hardware becomes decoupled to a specific task but provides amazing performance for a variety of use cases and can change state in a few clock cycles.
Nothing ARM specs out comes close to what Apple Silicon does. So let's just stop calling these ARM chips/processors. Right now.
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There was a time when no-one would ever buy '...professional ___ with a RISC chip...'. You could replace RISC with any number of words but that one came to mind instantly. There was a die-hard group that said RISC was a gimmic, CISC was the only viable way foward. Here we are with every major platform running in RISC, and Intel continuing to keep CISC alive by emulating CISC on RISC hardware. Don't EVER listen to anyone that thinks that the technologies that aren't the "mainstream" have no long term value, they'll very likely silently eat their words within a decade. I recall a time when we all though 1Ghz was impossible, when 10nm was impossible. The engineers working on this stuff eat impossible for breakfast.
What Apple's doing in designing a new platform and compute design may well be the last of the discrete CPU systems, after this we may move to quantum or light based computing. Who knows. But the CISC running over RISC, burning bits in a 40 year old instruction set is NOT sustainable for very much longer. Just like vacuum tubes, discrete transistors, backplanes, etc. the idea of a "CPU" will fade to history.
We know the goal: an electronic "brain" that can operate at the level of a mammal's but completely controllable and reconfigurable to a single purpose on the fly. Nothing in production from any of the major chip fabs gets us close to that.
You can sit by and whine as the wold goes by, or you can be amazed, develop for the new ideas and see how far you can push them, and in turn push the hardware folk to push harder. Choose wisely.
