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On mobile systems, the major concern is low power usage and battery duration, not performance, hence the dominance of ARM-based chips in this field. The great appeal of M1 chip is the performance and low battery power usage.

ARM is the Microsft of the semiconductor world. The company design and licenses CPU cores for several market segments, including: ARM cortex-M series cores intended for MCU - microcontrollers SOC (System-On-Chip); CPU-cores intended for embedded systems processors (MPU) such as ARM-Cortex-A series intended for embedded systems and mobile devices. And there are also ARM cores designed for servers, for instance A64FX Fujitsu chip that powers the Japanese supercomputer Fugaku, until now the fastest in the world. ARM cores highly customized with microarchitecture, such as Apple M1 and some Samsung ARM chips, are designed under architecture license.

A MCU is a self-contained chip containing up to 1MB of RAM, Flash memory up to 1 MB for the firmware; and several other peripherals such as digital IO, analog-to-digital converter, UART RS232 and so on. They are not comparable to Intel chips. MCUs are used in keyboards, mouses, car engine control unit, toys, home appliances and so on. The difference between the cores intended for MCUs and cores intended for MPUs is that cores for MPUs need external flash memory chips and external RAM memory. MPU chips and also they contains MMU - memory management unit for supporting virtual memory and operating systems that need this feature, such as iOS, Windows CE, Linux, BSD and etc.