> they likely have reallocated fab capacity they had planned for the successor to the M1 back to making the M1

Got any proof or something? This is a bold claim to make.

Some benchmark sites claim they saw performance reports. Whether they make those up to see more traffic, I cannot tell. If I worked at Apple, I would not tell :)

For example https://www.cpu-monkey.com/en/cpu-apple_m1x-1898 talks about a 12 Core CPU but with only 16GB RAM.

> I don't think they have the fab capacity to be able to do that

Do you have a source for there being any fab capacity shortage for Apple (or anyone, for that matter) at 5nm? Older nodes are a different story because that's still where most of TSMC's customers are doing their high-volume production.

Plenty of people would like to die-shrink their 7nm designs down to 5nm if only capacity existed.

I think plenty of people will skip it. Even ignoring the high cost, not everything scales as well with every new node. There're plenty of customers who will have no interest in this node right now and some that will have no interest in it ever. I've not seen anything that suggests capacity shortages at 5nm yet, especially for Apple who've already booked all of 3nm for next-gen.

SRAM scaling from 7nm to 5nm is pitiful. While the CPU transistors see 50-70% increases, the SRAM is only shrinking 20-30%.

For chips with massive cache, that isn’t super cost effective (I suspect as a cost saving measure that we’ll see L2/L3 cache moving to a separate chip on a larger process while the rest shrinks down).

There’s already signs of multiple “next generation” chips in the works.