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Apple thinking about how their products look. What has the world come to!

The problem is when “they” worry a bit too much about how the products look than work. Apple entered into its wunderphase 15-20 years with a perfect blend of function and form, but to many, too much of the function has been handicapped by too much obsession with form over the last half decade or so.
 
As much as I would like to see a bigger M1 iMac, I probably couldn't afford it! Even then, some music software still isn't compatible with Big Sur or the M1, and the next macOS would probably coincide with release of such an iMac.
 
Let’s not get ahead of ourselves on the speed of the new iPad Pro. I predict to keep thermals and battery life in line it may be underclocked a bit so it is premature to say it will be “up to 9% faster” than a maxed out 16.

If it is. Great!

Unfortunately it’s not the iPad Pro hardware (2017 and on) that limits the iPad. It’s the mobile class operating system and apps. The branching from iOS is still not significant, but with Apple creating a standard silicon across the Macs and iPad Pro maybe one day devs will build universal apps for both. We are not there yet.
 
If the M1 has a max speed of 3.2GHz how is it faster than my 2017 iMac i7 that maxes at 4.2 GHz? My specs are in my signature. Obviously, I'm not understanding. Please educate me.
What makes a CPU fast? What GHz tells you is the clock speed of the CPU. That is NOT the same thing as how many instructions the CPU executes in a second.

(a) Modern CPUs are superscalar, meaning they can execute more than one instruction per cycle. Intel can (under the best conditions) execute 5 per cycle. M1 can (under the best conditions, which occur a lot more frequently) execute 8 per cycle.

(b) Even though these peak numbers are important, much of the time the CPU executes many fewer than that instructions per cycle. The reasons include branch mispredictions, or the CPU has to halt while it is waiting for data to be brought in from RAM.
Apple has substantially better branch predictors than Intel.
Also modern CPUs use out-of-order technology to try to continue processing other instructions while waiting for data to be brought in from RAM (or from an outer level cache). Apple's OoO technology is vastly superior to Intels along every dimension -- much larger ROB, many more physical registers, larger (and more importantly late allocation/early release load store queues, etc.
Intel (averaged over a range of code) has an IPC (instructions per cycle) of around 1.75. (That's Skylake, might be around 2 for the new Willow Cove designs).
Apple has an IPC of about twice that, so around 3.5, with a few "obvious" way that they could boost that to at least 4 in the next design, based simply on optimizing their existing micro-architecture.

(c) Apple has lower latency execution in a number of ways. Many instructions are "executed" at Decode, Map or Rename (ie within the in-order front-end). Intel does this with the stack engine, but Apple does it with
- simple branches
- moves
- immediates
- some value prediction (for loads)

There's much much more to say, but this gives the basic idea.
Intel has shorter cycles, but Apple does a LOT MORE WORK in a given cycle. And overall doing more work in a slightly longer cycle
- averages to better performance
- uses a LOT less power
- uses a lot less area (many more transistors, but the transistors can be a lot smaller -- fast transistors are BIG)
- is a much better match to where semiconductor technology is heading (honestly smarter but lower GHz has been the obvious direction of technology since the late 2000s; most of Intel's current problems stem from the fact that they refused to adapt themselves to this new reality)
 
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Let’s not get ahead of ourselves on the speed of the new iPad Pro. I predict to keep thermals and battery life in line it may be underclocked a bit so it is premature to say it will be “up to 9% faster” than a maxed out 16.

It's clocked the same as the M1 in a MacBook Air, MacBook Pro, Mac mini, or iMac. The benchmark results are identical.

However, like the MacBook Air (and perhaps more aggressively so), it will almost certainly throttle after a while. Which is fine; sustained loads aren't really its main use case.
 
What makes a CPU fast? What GHz tells you is the clock speed of the CPU. That is NOT the same thing as how many instructions the CPU executes in a second.

(a) Modern CPUs are superscalar, meaning they can execute more than one instruction per cycle. Intel can (under the best conditions) execute 5 per cycle. M1 can (under the best conditions, which occur a lot more frequently) execute 8 per cycle.

(b) Even though these peak numbers are important, much of the time the CPU executes many fewer than that instructions per cycle. The reasons include branch mispredictions, or the CPU has to halt while it is waiting for data to be brought in from RAM.
Apple has substantially better branch predictors than Intel.
Also modern CPUs use out-of-order technology to try to continue processing other instructions while waiting for data to be brought in from RAM (or from an outer level cache). Apple's OoO technology is vastly superior to Intels along every dimension -- much larger ROB, many more physical registers, larger (and more importantly late allocation/early release load store queues, etc.
Intel (averaged over a range of code) has an IPC (instructions per cycle) of around 1.75. (That's Skylake, might be around 2 for the new Willow Cove designs).
Apple has an IPC of about twice that, so around 3.5, with a few "obvious" way that they could boost that to at least 4 in the next design, based simply on optimizing their existing micro-architecture.

(c) Apple has lower latency execution in a number of ways. Many instructions are "executed" at Decode, Map or Rename (ie within the in-order front-end). Intel does this with the stack engine, but Apple does it with
- simple branches
- moves
- immediates
- some value prediction (for loads)

There's much much more to say, but this gives the basic idea.
Intel has shorter cycles, but Apple does a LOT MORE WORK in a given cycle. And overall doing more work in a slightly longer cycle
- averages to better performance
- uses a LOT less power
- uses a lot less area (many more transistors, but the transistors can be a lot smaller -- fast transistors are BIG)
- is a much better match to where semiconductor technology is heading (honestly smarter but lower GHz has been the obvious direction of technology since the late 2000s; most of Intel's current problems stem from the fact that they refused to adapt themselves to this new reality)
Thank You name99. That explains a lot and helps me understand.
 
Yeah but most likely not a software upgrade. Releasing an M1X or M2 doesn't help with our current devices.

I hope I'm wrong!
Yes, it's probably a hardware limitation.

They had to start somewhere, and given that the M1 is sort of an evolved A14, a phone/tablet chip which really only supported the internal display plus one external display, this is one of the things they punted on for the first release.
 
Yes, it's probably a hardware limitation.

They had to start somewhere, and given that the M1 is sort of an evolved A14, a phone/tablet chip which really only supported the internal display plus one external display, this is one of the things they punted on for the first release.
The monitor limitation and especially the 16GB RAM limitation have Pros/Prosumers waiting out the M1. I will be interested to see what the new machines look like. Nothing for Pros yet.
 
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