Apple M1 foreshadows Rise of RISC-V
Not clear what RISC-V has to do with the Apple M1.<p>Also not clear what benefit RISC-V would have for &quot;coprocessors&quot;. GPUs and various machine learning speedup devices are massively parallel devices, intended to run small, specialized programs in parallel on multiple specialized execution units.<p>Also note that the real win of the Apple M1 is lower power consumption. In terms of basic compute speed, there are Intel products that are roughly comparable. But they use more much more power. This is more about battery life than compute power. (Also heat. Apple laptops have had a long-standing problem with running too hot, from having too much electronics in a thin fanless enclosure. The M1 gets them past that.)<p>The hardware video decoder is probably to make it possible to play movies with most of the rest of the machine in a sleep mode. The CPU is probably fast enough to do the decode in software, but would use more power than the video decoder.