If you sell chips to device manufacturers for a living, increasing die size cuts directly into how much you make per wafer.
When you sell devices containing your own custom chips, your profit margin does not depend on the cost of fabbing that chip alone.
As a bonus, when everyone else is trying to make a smaller die and cranks up the clocks for performance, you are hugely more power efficient (without giving up performance) when you throw die size at an extra wide instruction decode with a ton of execution units running at a much slower clock speed and have huge reorder buffers so you can track more instructions in flight.
https://www.anandtech.com/show/16226/apple-silicon-m1-a14-de...
Increasing the cache sizes to be as large as Apple's phone SOC is an extremely recent decision on AMD and Intel's part, as noted at the M1 introduction.
>Last year we had speculated that the A13 had 128KB L1 Instruction cache, Apple has confirmed that it’s actually a massive 192KB instruction cache.
That’s absolutely enormous and is 3x larger than the competing Arm designs, and 6x larger than current x86 designs
https://www.anandtech.com/show/16226/apple-silicon-m1-a14-de...
> throwing more transistors at the problem doesn't necessarily help power efficiency
Getting your performance from IPC improvements at a lower clock (at the cost of die space) instead of pushing the power envelope to hit ever increasing clock speeds seems to be paying off quite well.
For instance, when power leakage became a huge issue at 20nm, Apple was less affected since they ran their clocks so much lower.
>Apple is something of the exception here, with the 20nm A8 proving to be a solid SoC, thanks in part to their wide CPU design allowing them to achieve good performance without using high clockspeeds that would exacerbate the problem.
https://www.anandtech.com/show/9686/the-apple-iphone-6s-and-...
Keep in mind that most laptops have a 128 bit memory interface as do even high end desktops like i7/i9 and the ryzen 59XX. M1 max and pro are 256, and 512 bits and running at 4266 Mhz!
Performance per core near the best Intel and AMD have to offer, but perf/watt is crazy better.
It's a similar situation to legacy x86 software that doesn't support AVX-512. It still runs, but could run faster if it supported the available hardware.
For example, World of Warcraft is available in an ARM native version that supports Metal and can run at 120 FPS on the 16 inch MacBook M1 Max with the graphics settings cranked up to 10.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JZV3bOpv2Rs
x86 games on OpenGL don't run nearly as well, as expected.
What the Apple chips do appear to be is a successful application of the "lead bullets" approach to good engineering. If you compare to Zen 2 it's clear that Apple's designs are not really incomparably better than peers, but they are excellent. With the advantage of better software support and a better manufacturing process than other mobile CPUs they perform really well.
They don't directly compete with CPU vendors but hopefully their new products light the fire under their PC counterparts to build better products. I sure hate feeling trapped in their super buggy software ecosystem.