I want to emphasize it's unknown whether this is the successor to the M1 by major or minor version - but it's more likely that this is a production ramp-up for the new Pro machines to be announced during WWDC and will likely ship later this summer.

The successor to the M1, the lowest-end Apple Silicon running on Macs, is likely expected next year in a rumored redesign of the Macbook Air (whatever the CPU itself is called)

This is what I am banking on. I want to get another year out of my old Intel Macs before getting an MX-based Macbook that should melt my eyeballs with its speed while lasting a day and a half on battery.

Everything I've heard says it's an M1 with more performance cores and possibly more cache and GPU cores. It seems awfully soon for it to be V9.

M1 is Armv8.5-A, which is almost the same as Armv9.0-A, except that it lacks SVE2 vector instructions. Apple's CPUs tend to move to the latest architecture revision that is available at the time the instruction set gets nailed down, so the next generation (M2 and A15) would be Armv8.6-A if it lacks SVE2, or Armv9.1-A if it includes it.

Most likely the M2/A15 will include SVE2 but won't be available for another six months, while the M1+ in the coming Macbook Pro would still be Armv8.5-A.

Ah OK, that makes sense