One early benchmark showed allocating and destroying an NSObject performing drastically better on the M1 vs recent Intel Macs. This wasn’t an accident. It’s probably not representative of performance overall. They have enough vertical integration to make their own first party solutions clear optimization targets.
All it takes is looking at what's going on in commonly used code, deciding to optimize for X, Y, and Z, and commit to it. If Intel isn't doing this already, that's all the fault of current management for not making it a priority.
The only way that Apple's vertical integration helped them make that management decision is that they were able to say "our customer is a typical laptop user." Intel tries to cater to much larger markets, so perhaps when management goes to plan a laptop chip, they are less aggressive with deciding to optimize. But I have a feeling that Apple's optimizations are generally good for nearly all code, not just for specific use cases.
Don't discount how a weak organization can make poor decisions even when all necessary information seems to be readily available.
They could run their benchmarks on the Debian repository and it would probably be representative enough.
If they haven't done so, perhaps because it seemed tedious or unimportant, well, that mistake would be on them.
Even if you know about them, you need an expert in each to truly push the hardware to the real limits that get hit in the respective industry. The small differences between real implementations and simulated loads can drastically alter the performance characteristics and cause proc manufacturers to miss the mark.
In short, Apple has a number of 10x engineers that they move around to whatever project needs the most help, whether that is hardware, or application software, or operating system software, or services infrastructure, or whatever.
If some project starts getting enough negative “above the fold” coverage, then they will be temporarily gifted one or more of these special engineers.
Do that enough times, and those 10x engineers will gain enough experience in enough different areas that they will be able to reason well about the other end of whatever pipeline they’re on, and will know other 10x engineers that they can work with on that other end of the pipeline, because they had previously worked with them on some other project in the past months or years.
And those 10x engineers really will make a huge difference in what that project is capable of delivering.
The key failure of this operating mode is that most of the 10x engineers never get enough time to transfer much knowledge or skills to the others on the temporary team they are currently working with, and so things will start slowly deteriorating when they are necessarily moved on to the next project.
Rinse and repeat.
Also we see not the first chip but the first one that met their needs (demonstrably better performance on their workloads).
By which I mean: presumably MacOS has been running a many generations of A processors, so they have had a lot of time to figure out what tweaks would be good and which turn out to be pessimization and overkill. It doesn't hurt that there is significant internal overlap between modern macOS and iOS.
Microsoft proved with the XBOX and Surface series they can make good hardware if they want, now they need to move to chip design.
Microsoft has at least one homegrown processor that it has ported Windows and Linux to with the confusingly named 'Edge'.
https://www.theregister.com/2018/06/18/microsoft_e2_edge_win...
Microsoft doesn't even _need_ to target Arm, they could easily team up with AMD or go the whole thing solo and target anything from RISC-V, Arm to an in-house ISA.
What was the last version of Windows to support either of these platforms?
The reason I think so is when I was at Google is was 7 years between when we told Intel what could be helpful, and when they shipped hardware with the feature. Also, when AMD first shipped the EPYC "Naples" it was crippled by some key uarch weaknesses that anyone could have pointed out if they had been able to simulate realistic large programs, instead of tiny and irrelevant SPEC benchmarks. If Apple is able to simulate or measure their own key workloads and get the improvements in silicon in a year or two they have a gigantic advantage over anyone else.