The size of the register file, the decode and fetch widths, the reorder buffer / retirement queue size... Everything about the M1 is bigger than its competitors (except for Power9 SMT8)
So you're not talking about the area of the cores, you mean simply bigger in a microarchitectural sense ?
Because as I just added in my previous comment (sorry, I don't expect you to reply so quickly) on the dieshots Firestorm cores seems much smaller than the Zen2 cores. The 5nm TSMC can explain this, but probably not completely.
And that is why I have a doubt about the following statement:
> which will make scaling up to more-cores more difficult.
Apple has not yet released a CPU for the desktop. But I don't see anything that prevents them from removing the GPU, Icestorm cores and multiplying the number of Firestorm cores.
In fact, Firestorm cores seem to have a remarkably small surface area and very low power consumption and dissipation.
