2020 Mac Mini – Putting Apple Silicon M1 To The Test
For people to young to remember or know, the original "Benchmark Wars" were between Intel and Motorola with NEC, Oki, and Hitachi occasionally getting a punch in there.<p>I worked at Intel at the time and the 80286 (x86) architecture was going head to head against the 68000 (68k) architecture. The marketing was intense with Motorola consistently using benchmarks that benefited from linear memory access and Intel using benchmarks that benefited from branching and floating point. This was when Intel made a compiler that recognized it was compiling the 'Dhrystone' benchmark and substituted custom hand assembled code for the output of the compiler.<p>Watching Intel and AMD compete was entertaining because Intel was competing against its own ISA. It added new instructions, AMD created a 64 bit extension, both worked some interesting improvements in memory handling an cache handling.<p>Adding Apple's take on ARM to the mix is a lot of fun for me. It is like reading a new novel in the Asimov Foundation series or maybe a fourth volume in the Lord of the Rings trilogy. I am really glad they are pushing the edge of the envelope here, it is the kind of technology that made me get into computers in the first place.