It's not about memory bandwidth. [1] shows that M1 is 66x faster at pointer chasing than an equivalent AMD. You can look at [2] and [3] to see that TLB penalty

It's not about memory bandwidth. [1] shows that M1 is 66x faster at pointer chasing than an equivalent AMD. You can look at [2] and [3] to see that TLB penalty is also lower at any given test depth which is important because TLB misses aren't that infrequent and they're serial in your ability to access any memory that's not in your cache. It's not an unreasonable hypothesis that this is because of on-package memory which means you can run with tighter thresholds since your memory traces are shorter. Their unified memory architecture also means that GPU is way more effective since you never need to copy memory from the CPU to GPU. That's probably not a huge deal for normal apps, but having rendering the screen not competing with any app resources for memory probably isn't nothing. Neither the CPU nor the GPU can fully utilize the available memory bandwidth [4] The insane memory bandwidth is to also support the other coprocessors like the media engine & to ensure that you can do a bunch of tasks in parallel without them contending with each for resources. Those workloads do benefit greatly from memory bandwidth & the "artist" community is hugely important to Apple. The reason M is overall faster is more because of things like better ILP (e.g. fixed-width RISC encoding vs compression-like CISC means easier to keep the pipeline fed). Apple software for the most part is better engineered for performance & the M chip is optimized for that performance profile (e.g. C# and Java vs Swift/ObjC - Rc is pretty conclusively faster & requires less memory overall not to mention that the M chip has specific optimizations to further reduce the traditional cost of Rc that they have to pay because they don't typically distinguish Rc from Arc as Rust does). The final truth is that Apple throws a lot of money at this problem as well & buy up the latest processing node to stay ahead of the competition. [1] https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/apple-m-cpus-probably-much-faster-than-we-realize-yaron-shani/ https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/apple-m-cpus-probably-much-fa... [2] https://www.anandtech.com/show/16252/mac-mini-apple-m1-tested https://www.anandtech.com/show/16252/mac-mini-apple-m1-teste... [3] https://www.anandtech.com/show/17047/the-intel-12th-gen-core-i912900k-review-hybrid-performance-brings-hybrid-complexity/6 https://www.anandtech.com/show/17047/the-intel-12th-gen-core... [4] https://www.anandtech.com/show/17024/apple-m1-max-performance-review/2 https://www.anandtech.com/show/17024/apple-m1-max-performanc...