The M1 feels like we are approaching the end of an era.
A long time ago, CPU improvements meant higher single-core performance. If you upgraded once every 3 years, you expected something like 5x higher performance for the same price.
That came to an end ~15 years ago. At first, manufacturers tried using the increased transistor budget for more CPU cores, but consumers didn't really care about that. 4-core processors were common in 2010, and they are still common in consumer devices. Most people don't use their computers for things that benefit from a large number of cores.
A parallel development focused on delivering the same performance with less power. The first laptops I used were much slower than desktops with a similar price. This improved slowly, but in the 2010s we got used to the idea that a thin lightweight laptop like the MBP could deliver near-desktop level performance for a reasonable price.
With the M1, even that seems to be coming to an end. By using the same hardware in devices from the iPad to the iMac, Apple seems to believe that consumers no longer care about higher performance. The returns from increased power efficiency are also diminishing, because the display will soon dominate the power consumption in normal use. Maybe we will see the same hardware in even smaller and smaller devices, but consumer computers are approaching the point where they are simply good enough.
That may mean greater divergence between computers for consumers and power users. Most people may not need a faster computer, but I could easily find uses for a desktop with thousands of CPU cores and petabytes of memory.
www.extremetech.com
