[ip26]

When M1 came out, I remember a lot of excitement around the past progress of performance in the A* core line; people extrapolated future performance and thought they were going to get +20% (ST) every 18 months on top of M1.

I think this expectation of sustained performance gains was a part of some of the more glowing reviews, rather than a narrow evaluation of M1 itself.

Anyway, it wasn’t a reasonable expectation. But I think people expected it anyway.

[microtonal]

And yet, the M2 has 18% performance improvement in about 18 months. Presumably also single-threaded, since the CPU core configuration is the same as the M1. 18% is close enough to 20%.