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> M1 apparently has much lower power consumption.

Even compared to similar manufacturing processes ?



The manufacturing process is TSMC's, so probably not.

To me the innovation is using phone-type SoC technology.

A lot of the power (and die area) demand in modern chips is in the interface circuitry to drive the few centimetres of PCB trace between ICs.

Put the RAM in the same package as the CPU and you eliminate that interface. That gives you die space and power budget for big buffers and lots of parallel execution.

Interface transistors (and wires) are many times larger than the core compute logic transistors (and wires), so there is much more than a one-for-one gain.


There are no similar manufacturing processes, Apple has paid for time-limited exclusivity on 5nm.




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