> And what does “Everything is in one chip” even mean?
I guess he's mainly thinking of GPU, which isn't unique. But there's not that many SoCs with that amount of power in one SoC. So it's close to competing with alternatives with discrete GPUs, which does increase power consumption.
I believe it has integrated Flash controller too, which is very unique for a laptop/desktop chip, no?
> Because the memory certainly isn’t, it’s soldered on the package but it’s not part of the package, it just doesn’t take additional room on the main board. And there are a bunch of other chips on the mainboard
It's on the package so it can be as close to the SoC as possible. That decreases the capacitance of the traces, which decreases power consumption.
It's not stacked on top of the SoC, which might have been even better (but harder to cool), but it's close.
> Finally, it’s pretty much just following mobile / phone chip SoC design, so any other manufacturer could do the same, if they wanted to create a giant and expensive SOC.
Uh, yeah, anyone could copy the M1 for a laptop/desktop product. But they haven't exactly done that yet have they? That's kind of the point?
> the M1 family is the sort of scale you usually see on giant workstation or server chips
Yeah, which again, almost never packs the kind of functionality Apple does into the M1.
With that many transistors, on such an advanced process, you're going to have a lot of leakage currents, so Apple must have put an impressive amount of work into power management.
I mean, it's not just about being an SoC with lots of things packed within the chip or extremely close to the cheap (memory). No. It's apparent that they've focused on across the entire design process. Even the choice of ARM factors into that (fewer transistors needed for instruction decoding). But I wouldn't say the original comment is completely wrong.
I guess he's mainly thinking of GPU, which isn't unique. But there's not that many SoCs with that amount of power in one SoC. So it's close to competing with alternatives with discrete GPUs, which does increase power consumption.
I believe it has integrated Flash controller too, which is very unique for a laptop/desktop chip, no?
> Because the memory certainly isn’t, it’s soldered on the package but it’s not part of the package, it just doesn’t take additional room on the main board. And there are a bunch of other chips on the mainboard
It's on the package so it can be as close to the SoC as possible. That decreases the capacitance of the traces, which decreases power consumption.
It's not stacked on top of the SoC, which might have been even better (but harder to cool), but it's close.
> Finally, it’s pretty much just following mobile / phone chip SoC design, so any other manufacturer could do the same, if they wanted to create a giant and expensive SOC.
Uh, yeah, anyone could copy the M1 for a laptop/desktop product. But they haven't exactly done that yet have they? That's kind of the point?
> the M1 family is the sort of scale you usually see on giant workstation or server chips
Yeah, which again, almost never packs the kind of functionality Apple does into the M1.
With that many transistors, on such an advanced process, you're going to have a lot of leakage currents, so Apple must have put an impressive amount of work into power management.
I mean, it's not just about being an SoC with lots of things packed within the chip or extremely close to the cheap (memory). No. It's apparent that they've focused on across the entire design process. Even the choice of ARM factors into that (fewer transistors needed for instruction decoding). But I wouldn't say the original comment is completely wrong.