[easde]

I like Apple's approach of having more narrow vector units rather than a few extremely wide ones. Narrower vector units are generally easier to program and easier to support on small cores (like the efficiency cores). It's a good tradeoff for cores used outside of niche applications that do a ton of numerical calculations.

Compare this to a design like AVX/AVX2 that has wider 256-bit vectors, but almost always forces the programmer to treat them as two 128-bit vectors glued together. All because Intel realized they had to power down half of each vector ALU to save power at idle.

Of course, the future is hopefully more flexible vector ISAs like SVE. AVX-512 is not too bad either today, but Intel seems almost pathologically opposed to making forward-looking decisions (what about when they want to double the vector width again??).