If you were alive during the 90s or 2000s, you surely remember that tune. It’s the anthem of Intel, the world’s most dominant chip maker, or at least, they were. Since then, Intel has had a pretty rough fall from glory. In fact, today, Intel barely ranks in the top 10 when it comes to the world’s largest chip makers. They come in behind Nvidia, TSMC, Broadcom, Samsung, ASML, AMD, Qualcomm, Applied Materials, and Texas Instruments.And when you contextualize this with Nvidia’s performance, things
It’s not just node, it’s also the design. If I remember properly, ARM has constant instruction length which helps a lot with caching. Anyway, Apple’s M CPUs are still way better when it comes to perf/power ratio.
Yes, it’s certainly more complicated than that, but the lithography is a huge part since they can cram more transistors into a smaller area, which is critical for power savings.
I highly doubt instruction decoding is a significant factor, but I’d love to be proven wrong. If you know of a good writeup about it, I’d love to read it.
Here, I’ve found an article. M CPUs are also much more integrated, like a SoC, which gives them further performance/power advantages sacrificing extensibility.