Or they may be throttled lower all the time, so that using the four performance cores still stays within its cooling budget. Either way, it's not going to run as fast as the MBP without having a fan.
I'm very curious to see benchmarks on these things. Also wondering if processors are performance binned from one SKU to another, or if it's really just the amount of RAM and storage.
Apple's been known to have secret hardware differences like that, the 2018 iPad Pro had 4GB of RAM unless you specced it up to 1TB storage, which included a secret upgrade to 6GB RAM. You wouldn't know from the specs, since Apple doesn't talk about how much RAM their iPads have.
Now here we are with the M1 and Apple doesn't talk about the clock speed. All MacBook Pros have an M1, but do they all have the same clock speed? Maybe.
I'm very curious to see benchmarks on these things. Also wondering if processors are performance binned from one SKU to another, or if it's really just the amount of RAM and storage.
Apple's been known to have secret hardware differences like that, the 2018 iPad Pro had 4GB of RAM unless you specced it up to 1TB storage, which included a secret upgrade to 6GB RAM. You wouldn't know from the specs, since Apple doesn't talk about how much RAM their iPads have.
Now here we are with the M1 and Apple doesn't talk about the clock speed. All MacBook Pros have an M1, but do they all have the same clock speed? Maybe.