Why is Apple's M1 chip so fast?
While the M1 is super impressive, I&#x27;m kind of wondering how scalable the performance increases they made here are.<p>They moved high bandwidth RAM to be shared between the CPU &amp; GPU, but they[1] can&#x27;t just keep expanding the SoC[2] with ever larger amounts of RAM. At some point they will need external RAM in addition to the on chip RAM. Perhaps they will ship 32GB of onboard memory with external RAM being used as swap? This takes a bit away from the super-efficient design they have currently.<p>Likewise, putting increasingly larger GPUs onto the SoC is going to be a big challenge for higher performance&#x2F; Pro setups.<p>I think Apple really hit the sweet spot with the M1. I suspect the higher end chips will be faster than their Intel&#x2F; AMD counterparts, but they won&#x27;t blow them out of the water the way the current MacBook Air&#x2F; MBP&#x2F; mini blow away the ~$700-2,000 PC market.<p>[1] I updated the text here because I&#x27;d originally commented here about the price of RAM which is largely irrelevant to the actual limitations.<p>[2] As has been pointed out below, the memory is not on the die with the CPU, but is in the same package. Leaving the text above intact.