[bigyabai]

That craze, as documented at the time, was due to the jump from a 10nm chip to a 5nm one. The way chips scale, that could add up to a 4x efficiency improvement in some areas, thus the M1 was faster than anything that wasn't fabbed on 7nm/5nm silicon. Even back then though, there were non-Intel chips that were still competitive with Apple Silicon, like the Ryzen 7 4800/5800u laptops.

Fast-forward to today, and Apple is arguably in the same boat as Intel. They have mediocre year-over-year density improvements (only a 1.5x-2x density improvement most years) and can't radically change their IPC with ISA updates. They pay hand-over-fist for TSMC's best nodes but lose out on profit margins to Nvidia's datacenter products. Adding insult to injury, Apple arguably has the worst modern desktop GPU architecture, which compounds the acceleration issues ARM has with SIMD and vector workloads. Apple Silicon is backed into a corner, from a design perspective. Ye olde "I'm a RISC machine that wishes I had CISC architecture" problem.

Still a great chip for browsing the web or editing video. But again, people cautioned back at the M1's launch that ARM is hardly a silver bullet. We still have x86 laptops because for >90% of PC use-cases, ARM isn't worth the licensing cost.

[calamaridude]

Never heard of a licensing cost for that fundamental of a technology. Do you know approximately how much goes towards ARM vs in x86 licensing (if that even exists).

[bigyabai]

It's hard to get a solid grasp on what Apple pays for ARM, since their licensing is all conducted behind closed doors. It's worth noting that ARM (the ISA technology) is owned by SoftBank, a holding firm which Apple has invested in quite heavily. Some reports claim that they pay as little as $0.30 a chip: https://www.tomshardware.com/news/apple-pays-arm-less-than-3...

x86 licensing costs are complicated. The basic old 16-bit architecture is very well-documented, and while it's proprietary it's still implemented in hundreds of products and clones. Modern 32-bit and 64-bit implementations have a lot more ISA extensions that would be costly to license and hard to develop on your own. As a result, modern x86 designs can really only be made by licensing Intel or AMD technology.