You can really get into this article and enjoy it. The text includes lots of interesting source mentions without resorting to footnotes. The red flags I see are a nod to a little-known German chip design startup at the very end, and the fact that this is the author’s very first blog post. Coincidentally, the owner of the website is also from Germany, and their university is just about an hour’s drive from the startup’s headquarters.
Excerpt:
«Which, to me, is the actual answer to this post’s title question. The M1 did not feel huge because of any single trick. It felt huge because Apple moved every lever at once: the widest core in the industry, on the best process node in the industry, with memory in the package, efficiency cores doing the housekeeping, an OS scheduler that knows about all of it, and a translation layer with dedicated silicon support so that nobody had to wait for the ecosystem to catch up. Any single one of these would have made a nice bullet point in a keynote. Together, and only together, they made a laptop that felt like a different kind of machine. That is what ten years of building phone chips on a merciless power budget teaches you.»
Author here - thanks for actually reading the whole thing, very glad you enjoyed it!
Fair question: I have no affiliation with Ubitium - no stake, no payment, no involvement in the company. The mention at the end comes from genuine interest in the bet against specialization.
You can really get into this article and enjoy it. The text includes lots of interesting source mentions without resorting to footnotes. The red flags I see are a nod to a little-known German chip design startup at the very end, and the fact that this is the author’s very first blog post. Coincidentally, the owner of the website is also from Germany, and their university is just about an hour’s drive from the startup’s headquarters.
Excerpt:
«Which, to me, is the actual answer to this post’s title question. The M1 did not feel huge because of any single trick. It felt huge because Apple moved every lever at once: the widest core in the industry, on the best process node in the industry, with memory in the package, efficiency cores doing the housekeeping, an OS scheduler that knows about all of it, and a translation layer with dedicated silicon support so that nobody had to wait for the ecosystem to catch up. Any single one of these would have made a nice bullet point in a keynote. Together, and only together, they made a laptop that felt like a different kind of machine. That is what ten years of building phone chips on a merciless power budget teaches you.»
Author here - thanks for actually reading the whole thing, very glad you enjoyed it!
Fair question: I have no affiliation with Ubitium - no stake, no payment, no involvement in the company. The mention at the end comes from genuine interest in the bet against specialization.
Happy to be challenged on the technical parts.