Agreed, nothing magic, no tricks, just solid engineering. Larger caches, lower latency caches, wider issue, larger re-order buffer, lower memory latency (30ns

Agreed, nothing magic, no tricks, just solid engineering. Larger caches, lower latency caches, wider issue, larger re-order buffer, lower memory latency (30ns without TLB misses), etc. The impressive part is that much engineering resulted in a low power chip that apple can afford to put into $700 desktops and $1000 laptops and competes with the per core performance (and wins on perf/watt) against Intel and AMD.