Indeed, but given they are on TSMC 5nm and the apparent strength of the architecture and their team I think most will be inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt for the moment.
Actually biggest worry might be the economics - given their low volumes at the highest end (Mac Pro etc) how do they have the volumes to justify investing in building these CPUs?
I suspect the plan is to redefine computing with applications that integrate GPU (aka massively parallel vector math), plain old Intel-style integer and floating point, and some form of ML acceleration.
So multiple superfast cores are less important for - say - audio/video if much of the processing is being handled by the GPU, or even by the ML system.
This is a difference in kind not a difference in speed, because plain old x86/64 etc isn't optimal for this.
It's a little like the next level of the multimedia PC of the mid-90s. Instead of playing video and sound the goal is to create new kinds of smart immersive experiences.
Nvidia and AMD are kinda sorta playing around the edges of the same space, but I think Apple is going to try to own it. And it's a conscious long-term goal, while the competition is still thinking of specific hardware steppings and isn't quite putting the pieces together.
Good point. Apple dominates a unique workload mix brought on by the convergence of mobile and portable computing. They can benchmark this workload mix through very different system designs.
Probably nothing to stop them running linux on M series chips. I'd be a bit surprised actually - suspect we'll see something like a 32 Core CPU which will go into the higher end machines (maybe 2 in the Mac Pros).
Actually biggest worry might be the economics - given their low volumes at the highest end (Mac Pro etc) how do they have the volumes to justify investing in building these CPUs?