Known-(very-)naive question: how and why is the M1 so far beyond both the-rest-of-ARM and both Intel (236.7-(Rocket Lake=147.6)=89.1) and AMD? ((236.7-(Zen 3=163.4)=73.3)?
Of course the technically correct answer I'm not looking for is "because Apple optimized it better" :D, I'm looking more at the (obviously probably extrpolated/guessed) path they took to get there. For example perhaps the increased memory bandwidth contributed (ie $pc go brrrrt :P) but like... this is like the elephant in the room that Apple is basically The Best™ ARM shop in town right now, and I guess I'm trying to reason both about the engineering (how Apple got to where they are now) and the market reaction (how Apple and everyone else are going to go forward).
It’s described in detail at Anandtech [1][2]. It has mostly to do with the fact that Apple’s chips are so much larger in every way measurable. There’s no magic, just raw performance from comparably massively over engineered designs. At the time of its release their reorder buffer had 630 entries vs Intel’s 352 and AMD’s 256. The floating point units inside the cores could handle quadruple of Intel’s throughput per clock. Etc. Etc.
That IPC figure is a bit misleading because different designs clock differently, for example the Apple designs likely have shorter pipelines which uses cycles and power more efficiently but won't support higher clock speeds. I doubt an M1 could hit 7.8GHz no matter how much cooling you gave it, but the Intel design will never be as energy efficient. Apple has different manufacturing constraints because vertical integration likely lets them spend more on the dies, they are using better fabs, etc. Meanwhile they prioritize having very few variants in a way Intel doesn't (or from another standpoint can't because they need more SKUs to sell). The engineers who do this stuff are living in 100-dimensional tradeoff land though, unlike what popular tech rants tend to imply there are no free lunches.
At a higher level it is just hard to do designs at this complexity so the dominating factor is budget divided by how many different products the team needs to make. Intel is the outlier, they managed to sabotage their own dominant position, but across the rest of the CPU world this holds true.
Of course the technically correct answer I'm not looking for is "because Apple optimized it better" :D, I'm looking more at the (obviously probably extrpolated/guessed) path they took to get there. For example perhaps the increased memory bandwidth contributed (ie $pc go brrrrt :P) but like... this is like the elephant in the room that Apple is basically The Best™ ARM shop in town right now, and I guess I'm trying to reason both about the engineering (how Apple got to where they are now) and the market reaction (how Apple and everyone else are going to go forward).