How impressed should I be. In terms of Apples history of manufacturing chips compared to, say, intel. This is their 4th generation of the M chip and it seems to be so far ahead of intel, a company with significant bigger history of chip production.
They were in the PowerPC consortium starting in 1991, co-developed ARM6 starting in the late 80s and the M series chips are part of the Apple Silicon family that goes back to at least 2010's Apple A4 (with non-Apple branded chips before then).
They've been in the chip designing business for a while.
Actually difficult to know if it was Keller. Apple bought PA Semi which is where he came from. But he came on as a VP after it was founded by other engineers who had worked on the Alpha chips a year before that. Did he make the difference? Who knows.
What does seem to be constant is that the best CPU designs have been touched by the hands of people who can trace their roots to North Eastern US. Maybe the correlation doesn't exist and the industry is small and incestuous enough that most designs are worked on by people from everywhere, but sometimes it seems like some group at DEC or Multiflow stumbled on the holy grail of CPU design and all took a drink from the cup.
It is impressive but it is also important to remember that Intel, AMD, and Qualcomm make dozens of different chips while Apple makes a handfull. That means they can't be as focused as Apple.
It’s not quite a fair comparison, given Intel has their own fab, while Apple uses TSMC—and pays them a lot to get exclusive access to new nodes before anyone else.
