M1. The End of the Intel Era.

For years ARM has been following x86 systems. It has been leaner, more energy efficient, more flexible to integrate, but always slower. ARM-based systems (ultrabooks, Raspberry Pi, the low-end Microsoft Surface) were always slower. Some quite frustratingly slow. Anyone who wanted proper performance, had to settle for an Intel-based (including AMD) system.

Probably the only exception has been the iPad. Especially the Pro line has always been blazing fast. But probably no one expected the M1 MacBook to be such a blast, beating any Intel-based system on the performance ground. And maintaining the usual ARM advantage of energy efficiency.

With Apple M1, for the first time ARM means sheer power. And this is the end of the era for Intel.

The Intel architecture has always been inferior in the performance-per-Watt category. But it is the M1 which has for the first time beaten Intel on pure performance. And of course it will be only up from here. 

It is unlikely Intel has any trick left up its sleeve.

It will be very interesting to watch the Microsoft move. They have ARM-based Windows ready. That was always considered a low-end version. But it is not unlikely Microsoft will team up with Nvidia to design an M1 equivalent and migrate the entire line of Windows to that chip. Definitely such move would be welcome by Apple competitors like Dell, Lenovo, HP. And considering such development, the Nvidia purchase of ARM can now be seen in an entirely new light.

Considering the existing excellence of virtualization technologies, emulation and the relative ease to cross-compile applications to an alternative processor architecture, Intel may see surprisingly little grip, losing customers quickly.

BTW drilling down to the root problem addressed by Apple when designing the M1 to achieve the performance breakthrough, it seems to be the memory bus bandwidth. Memory has been historically slow, lagging an order of magnitude behind processor speeds. This means that any significant improvement in memory operations would give the most bang for the processor subsystem. On teardowns you can see the RAM chips almost glued to the M1 CPU die.