why was the M1 chip so revolutionary? What did it do that combined power with efficiency so well that couldn’t be done before?

Question

I ask this because when M1 Mac’s came I felt we were entering a new era of portable PCs: fast, lightweight and with a long awaited good battery life.

I just saw the announcement of the Snapdragon X Plus, which is looking like a response to the M chips, and I am seeing a lot of buzz around it, so I ask: what is so special about it?

In: Technology

Answer 1

It is less revolutionary than evolutionary, the M1 is a RISC (reduced instruction set processor) using the ARM instruction set. Before the intel Macs I think motorola created the mac chip and it was also RISC like. So it isn’t like anyone reinvented the wheel here.

There is a misnomer another poster said, that the mac fused the graphics with the chip but graphics ‘on die’ have been on Intel chips for years. What Apple was able to do was share high speed memory between components that used to have discrete memory, and that greatly improved efficiency. As far as the other benefits of M1, like better heat and power requirements, this has been a feature of RISC based chips for a long time. They just were the best ones to break the hold of Intel/AMD on the market.