Yup. It's fast because it's got short distances to memory and everything else. Shorten the wire to memory cells and not only can you make signaling faster and run the memory at faster clock speed but you can do it with less accessory hardware for signal conditioning and error correction, which saves complexity and power. Using shorter paths to memory also lets you use lower voltages, which means less waste heat and less need to spend effort on cooling and overall power savings for the chip.

Shortening the wire also lowers latency between all the various on board devices, so communicating everywhere is faster.

There's a reason that manufacturers used to be able to "speed" up a chip by just doing a die shrink - photographically reducing chip masks to make them smaller, which also made them faster with relatively small amounts of work.

As the late Adm. Grace Hopper put it, there are ever so many picoseconds between the two ends of a wire.

A maximum of a few nanoseconds. Not much in comparison to an overall memory system latency.

> Shorten the wire to memory cells and not only can you make signaling faster and run the memory at faster clock speed but you can do it with less accessory hardware for signal conditioning and error correction, which saves complexity and power.

You cannot run away from that with just shorter PCB distance. The circuitry for link training is mandated by the standard.

You will need a redesigned memory standard for that.

Intel did have an ARM processor line, and it did have a market. They acquired the StrongARM line from Digital Equipment and evolved it into the XScale line. What Intel didn't want was for something to eat into it's x86 market, and Windows/ARM didn't exist. So they evolved ARM in a different direction than Apple later did. It was very successful in the high-performance embedded market.

As long as you don't define that market as "billions of mobile smartphones".

I remember StrongArms in PDAs back in the early 2000s.

They should have had ready processors for the smartphone, but IIRC they kept pushing x86 on phones.

They did and it couldn't find a market.

Lisa Su put the kibosh on K12 for focus reasons, given how well Zen turned out it was the right call at least for now.

Honestly, it doesn't. You just swap it for a new one and sell the old one.

When you have 8GB, you pay another 8GB and end up with 16.

In this case, you just sell you SoC with 8GB, and but another SoC with 16GB. You'll only pay out the difference.

This is pretty much how you upgrade a relatively recent phone works too.

iPhone 7s and iPhone 8s are still great low-end devices, and they reach the right market by being resold by people getting a newer one.

I don't see why M1 laptops would be an exception.