The point I haven't come across yet is the poor "optics" of the situation...
18% increase over two years?
The M2 is probably late. The model ids for these two laptops leaked out back in March. Does that cut it down to exactly one year? No. But it appears to be the same baseline tech that is in the A15 which did appear one year after the A14/M1 appeared. It is being a shipped on a node that TSMC started producing back in Q4 2020 also (at risk production at that point but shipping. Volume was in middle 2021. So basically the fab process is about year also also). There is few bleeding edge options about this chip.
It is more the case that it is trickling out to these Macs in a delayed fashion, that what the Silicon team is doing.
Apple Silicon team is spread out over more dies now. Supposedly the AR/VR system also has a custom SoC in it. The Watch hasn't moved in a long while now (still on N7 node and A13 E cores , while Mac is moving to year three on N5. ). Honestly, not really surprising. Part of Apple's silicon sprint to the lead was that they were doing far , far , far fewer products that most of the major competitors were. Make a new A-series SoC and toss it into 5 products. While other folks are making 10 different SoCs. As the product front gets broader it is going to be harder to keep a sprint pace in all directions. Throw on top the pandemic and not sure what "optics" would expect large jumps.
That's said it is a SoC not a uni-dimensional "Just a CPU". Apple isn't not far behind on primary CPU cores performance. So most of the additional transistor budget did not go there. So 18% isn't really all that bad. Apple got bigger performance/watt bang for the buck in other areas ( e.g. Video de/encode. ). They are not trying to build a single thread "hot rod" drag racing engine. The top proirity goal is perf/watt. That is where they spend most of their time and resources. Single and mulithread improvements fall out of that focus. but those are not the top priority goals.
Yes, I know about A14 v A15 (or A16), and the number of cores, and the chip shortage, etc -- I'm just talking about the optics of the presentation. It "appears" that Apple has only been able eke out a 9% improvement YoY in actual core speed of their Apple Silicon.
Intel would be ridiculed for this type of announcement. And both sides would be partially right.
That is really more about the myopathy of the narrow focus on CPU core performance that the optics breadth of what Apple is presenting. That is more an issue with the viewers of the scene than of the scene itself.
Again, I know that it will improve with A16 or A17 (whichever the M3 is based on), even more cores, etc. It just looks bad given the timing and the compromises they had to make to get the M2 launched along with their hardware schedule.
Somewhat doubtful Apple is going to push CPU P core count way higher for the 'plain' Mx products going forward. The P and E cores will get more budget and bigger caches but unlikely Apple is going to get into push the 'core count wars' down lower into the product line. As the memory bandwidth gets higher the P core might get a bigger share of the bandwidth, but it is still going to be balanced against the demands of the other cores. Apple will also more likely throw bigger budget at AMX (which is in the P core complex but not a user visible 'core'. ). Big picture lots of new transistor budget spent on more specialized compute than on very generic compute that delivers much better perf/watt.
Also moving the data being worked on closer to the processor ( or vice versa) is better than just blindly cranking core count.
The M2 is still not Thunderbolt 4 in part because it isn't complete on display processing. Should fix that when have more transistor budget before moving on to more CPU cores.
