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The M1 already has the widest CPU design of anything out there. It's possible that Apple will still be able to scale up even wider, but that wouldn't be a neces

The M1 already has the widest CPU design of anything out there. It's possible that Apple will still be able to scale up even wider, but that wouldn't be a necessarily "safe" bet. There's nothing obviously on the table for a big uptick in IPC. Apples got a great trajectory and great engineers, of course, but there's nothing here where you can point to an existing thing and be like "now as soon as they add that, too, wow!" It's "only" running at a peak of around 3.2ghz, though, so there's a lot of clear theoretical headroom on that front. But whether or not things like their cache or other subsystems can handle higher frequencies is unknown. But clocking up to ~4.5ghz turbo would be a potentially large gain - at the cost of also a huge uptick in power consumption, though, so Apple may just decline to go that route entirely, at least on their mobile CPUs.

floatboth 6y ago
> clocking up to ~4.5ghz turbo How high they can go really depends on the process. TSMC 7FF silicon didn't go that high early on, max clocks really were improving as the process matured. This was very noticeable with AMD Zen 2, early dies topped out at ~4.2 (for all cores on the die), later ones often easily take ~4.4.
- kllrnohj 6y ago
  How high it goes also depends on the CPU design. We know TSMC's 7NM can make CPUs that hit 4.5ghz, the Ryzen 5000 does this. It's also quite likely that TSMC's 5nm can still hit the 4ghz+ range in a CPU application. What we don't know is if the M1 can actually run at those frequencies, too, or if there's other bottlenecks that prevent the M1 from clocking higher than it does.