pastrychef
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- May 29, 2013
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Ah, get your point.
Agree that the approach to clocking does allow for scaling up by increasing TDP (this is one approach to binning, as I understand it - they test to see which can handle the higher speeds/heat reliably). Interesting that they provided almost zero information on frequency of this first chip. (I wonder if there's a technical reason, like other parts of the SoC don't lend themselves to this change, or just being secretive - probably the latter).
I'm not sure that apple's approach to combining lots of different functionality in a single SoC lends itself as well to just adding additional cpu cores. Part of what I'm saying is (I think) apple's specific approach may change the technical/economical hurdles on this. Of course hopefully I'm wrong and they'll start coming up with 12, 16, 24, 48 etc cores, with lots of performance and pricing differentiation.
But it's striking to me they brought out two really high-volume laptops - core products - AND their only consumer mac without a monitor, and all three use the same processor/system on a chip. Not to mention it looks like in a power/capability range that would be perfectly fine for an iMac, too. (It could be though that there are other reasons for this, like on the manufacturing/design side, and made more sense to do one barnstormer first time around and only modify it afterwards).
My guess is that the decision to stack so many components on to a single SoC is to reduce manufacturing costs and reduce points of failure.
Apple has been trying to eliminate MHz and GHz as a form of comparison for years. I don't find it surprising at all that they omit any mention of it here. However, in looking at the Geekbench results, it appears the M1 is running at 3.2GHz. Assuming this is true, they are achieving really great IPC from these CPUs!!