I think M2 is going to improve on single thread performance.

Judging from the geekbench scores[0], M1, M1 Pro, and M1 Max perform identically in single threaded tasks. And the newly leaked Mac Studio benchmark[1] shows essentially identical single thread performance.

[0]: https://browser.geekbench.com/mac-benchmarks [1]: https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/13330272

~15-20% faster if releases start this year, plus whatever optimizations learned from M1 in wide release such as perhaps tuning the silicon allocation given the various system. If next year, M2 or M3 (get it) will use Taiwan Semi's so-called 3nm, which should be a significant jump just like 7-5nm several years ago for the phones and iPads.

Hopefully one of the changes of the M2 design will be a better decorrelation of RAM and cores count.

They’d need that anyway for a Mac Pro replacement (128GB wouldn’t cut it for everyone), but even for smaller config it’s frustrating being limited to 16G on the M1 and 32 on the Pro. Just because I need more RAM doesn’t mean I want the extra size and heat or whatever.

For my purposes, the biggest drawback of using an SoC is being constrained to just the unified memory.

Since I run a lot of memory intensive tasks but few CPU or GPU bound tasks, a regular m1 with way more memory would be ideal.

I doubt there will be much learned after actually shipping M1. Developing silicon takes a long time. I wouldn’t be surprised if the design was more or less fixed by the time the M1 released.