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Out of curiosity, is Apple's M1 processor seemingly faster because it is actually more similar to a normal CPU progression but all the other common CPU's - x86 - had retroactive performance hits due to patching Spectre.

And therefore M1 seems so much more faster than it otherwise would?




ARM CPUs, including Apple's have been found vulnerable to some SPECTRE variants. As far as I understand, M1 already contains hardware mitigations for all known ones, but so do the latest Intel/AMD chips. (Or rather, contain fixes for all but these latest ones.)


I'm more inclined to believe M1 is fast because it's a modern design where every part of the architecture is under Apple's control.

In particular, the design uses a memory hub with the memory chips very close to the CPU core. And it has a massive L2 cache on top.




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