Is M1 Silicon All It Seems to Be?
Too Good to Be True?

With all the talk about the performance of the M1 Macs I have been curious about what the quality of the x64 code being compared to M1 code is. It seems from most of the reviews that the big wins are coming from Apple products or products that are specific to the Apple ecosystem, indicating they are likely created with Swift.

Since Swift 2.0 added full support of Intel and ARM Intrinsics with simd.h I would assume that developers have been using these libraries for some time now. I would also assume that nearly all Macs in use today have SSE4 instructions as well.

My question is if anyone has ever evaluated/audited the code generated by Swift for proper SIMD usage? If so, what were the results and where can I find the report and code?

I ask all of this because I have a very hard time buying the idea that ARM has magically overcome the inherent disadvantages of RISC compared to CISC at similar clock speed, memory footprint and die feature size. I’m of the mind that the performance of M1 compared to current Intel Macs is either all based on die feature size and/or possibly differences in the quality of the code generated by Swift.

As for die-feature size, 11th Gen Intel mobile processors on 10nm are benchmarking 15%-25% faster single threaded than 10th Gen at 14nm. Since we don’t have Macs with 11th Gen Intel mobile chips to compare M1 against I am dubious that M1 is as stout an architecture as current comparisons make them out to be.
['The Sharp Ninja']
['Apple', 'Mac', 'Swift', 'Intel', 'M1']