[Kuinox]

It's bench score on single thread is 0.6% better than the Intel Core Ultra 9 285K, which have a lower TDP and was released 6 months before. Boths use the same lithography node. If you look at the chip by their lithography node, the Apple silicons are the same than the others...

[SR2Z]

Apple's M-series chips are fantastic, but I do agree with you that it's mostly a combination of newer process and lots of cache.

Even when they were new, they competed with AMD's high end desktop chips. Many years later, they're still excellent in the laptop power range - but not in the desktop power range, where chips with a lot of cache match it in single core performance and obliterate it in multicore.

https://www.cpu-monkey.com/en/compare_cpu-apple_m4-vs-amd_ry...

[MindSpunk]

Alternatively, in the same socket and without the 3D stacked cache: https://www.cpu-monkey.com/en/compare_cpu-apple_m4-vs-amd_ry... with double the cores.

And in laptop form compared with a m4 max: https://www.cpu-monkey.com/en/compare_cpu-apple_m4_max_14_cp...

[philistine]

> Apple's M-series chips are fantastic, but I do agree with you that it's mostly a combination of newer process and lots of cache.

Why does it matter how they achieved their thunderous performance? Why must it be diminished to just a boatload of cache? Does it matter from which implementation detail you got the best single-core performance in the world? If it's just way more cache, why isn't Intel just cranking up the cache?

[SR2Z]

Intel IS cranking up the cache. Unfortunately, Intel chose to allocate significant resources to improving their fabs instead of immediately going to TSMC and pumping out a competitive chip, and in the years where they were misspending their resources, their competitors were gobbling up market share. Their new stuff that's competitive with Apple is all built by TSMC.

It's worth noting that Intel is not a stranger to building CPUs with lots of cache - they just segmented it into their server chips and not their consumer ones.

It matters because it is useful to understand why a given chip is faster or slower than its competitors. Apple didn't achieve this with their architecture/ISA or with some snazzy new hardware (with some notable exceptions like their x86 memory emulator), they did it by noticing how important cache was becoming to consumer workloads.