As someone who was actually thinking about getting the M1 based on the great performance and battery life, but without any actual use for it, I can see what you mean.
But the lack of openness is enough to stop those ideas, a new Surface laptop or next generation AMD mobile is much more useful.
I just hope that a battery life breakthrough is on the horizon from AMD or Intel.
>I just hope that a battery life breakthrough is on the horizon from AMD or Intel.
Intel has their Lakefield chips which use the same big.LITTLE configuration but their first large release chips will be Alder Lake next year.
My concern is less with Intel and AMD's ability to implement the cores as much as Microsoft's ability to implement a scheduler. They never came to grips with the weirdness of AMD's Bulldozer architecture.
Process node is a large part of it. Fab a Ryzen at 5nm and it will at least be in the ballpark, though X64 decode complexity makes it hard to completely close the gap.
There is also nothing stopping someone else from matching or beating M1 performance with another ARM64 core or RISC-V. Both of those have simple easy to parallelize decoders. It will be done if there is demand. AMD, Marvell, Qualcomm, and Intel all have the expertise to do it. Probably TI too if they wanted to reenter the CPU market.
I think you have to look beyond 'technical' ability and factor in commercial incentives: like who would be buying these CPUs and how many? Zero chance of an AMD or Intel ARM core like this in the near future. Marvell have pulled out of the Arm server market IIRC. Qualcomm a possibility but they have underwhelmed in the past.
Nvidia would be my favourite post the Arm acquisition but they probably have their eye on other markets.
But the lack of openness is enough to stop those ideas, a new Surface laptop or next generation AMD mobile is much more useful.
I just hope that a battery life breakthrough is on the horizon from AMD or Intel.