By now it is pretty clear that Apple’s M1 chip is a big deal. And the implications for the rest of the industry is gradually becoming clearer. In this story I want to talk about a connection to RISC-V microprocessors which may not be obvious to most readers.
Let me me give you some background first: Why Is Apple’s M1 Chip So Fast?
In that story I talked about two factors driving M1 performance. One was the use of massive number of decoders and Out-of-Order Execution (OoOE). Don’t worry it that sounds like technological gobbledegook to you.
This story will be all about the other part: Heterogenous computing. Apple is aggressively pursued a strategy of adding specialized hardware units, I will refer to as coprocessors throughout this article

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