Caught up how? The main advantage that apple silicon has is their high bandwidth unified memory architecture, but that's really just a high end DDR5 chipset. Which costs a small fortune these days. Afaik Ryzen AI is a newish mobile chipset that supports high speed memory and has a similar unified memory architecture, but I haven't seen a good apples to apples comparison.

Imo the main advantage apple always has is that they sell premium devices. Comparisons with other devices and chips should be drawn by market segment to be useful.

Several reasons.

First, Apple usually uses the latest TSMC production process (because they are willing to spend more $$$), while AMD and Intel don't. This might actually change with AMD Zen6, at least that is the rumor.

Second, Intel and AMD need to keep lots of redundant backwards compatibility.

Third, Apple doesn't really care about upgradability and can improve performance by having RAM closer to the CPU. This might change as we see with AMD Strix Point. It is not good for consumers, but it might be good specifically for mobile devices.

Fourth, Apple usually sells their devices for a lot more $$$ and it is a complete package, so they can afford to have a $700 CPU in their laptop, while AMD and Intel need to actually make money on the CPU itself.

Lastly, Intel and AMD are quite good when it comes to multicore performance. But Apple is really good in single-core and efficiency. This is mostly because AMD and Intel design their architectures primarily for datacenter and then use that same architecture in PC and mobile CPUs. That is why Zen5 for example isn't that much better than Zen4 on desktop or mobile, while the datacenter version of Zen5 (EPYC) is a beast.

amd and lunar occupation lake are fine, apple chips has been creeping up in power consumption actually. Windows sleep manager is just dogshit.

lemme just turbo this piece of shit processor to 5 ghz to unroll this library on website 10 ms faster, this will not jeopardize my trying to stay at 1 ghz range, at all (but i won't start second core with this nonsense at 1 ghz, because that's energy inefficient)

Is ARM the only way to get there?

Lunar Lake disproves this pretty handily IMO, incredible leap in efficiency while still on x86.

As for Apple's superiority, consider that they've got tons more cash to burn on R&D as well as a narrower set of products/use cases to build for. So they can afford to drop the money making the best premium chips for personal & professional use, while Intel has to consider everything from $600 laptops to $17,000 server processors

I can't say for sure, but having read opinions on the RISC (reduced instruct set computer, e.g. ARM, MIPS, RISC-V) vs CISC (complex instruct set computer, e.g. x86) debate over many years: Generally RISC was and still is viewed as good idea, leading to simpler CPUs, which in turn would reduce the size and power consumption as well. RISC architectures had quite good success in embedded applications thanks to that, but for laptops/desktops, they didn't get there until I guess with Apple recently.

However, Intel seems to have managed to mitigate the inherent disadvantage by basically subdividing the complex instructions into micro instructions, which (by my understanding) means that a modern x86 CPU is kinda similar to a RISC one under the hood, but with some more complex instruction decoder logic on top. So last I heard this still gives a slight advantage to RISC in terms of die size and power consumption, but not as big as was once thought.

One maybe more relevant difference is the path they took to arrive at modern laptop CPUs: Apple's M chips are descendants of the iPhone SoCs, which were designed for low power first, and were then improved for performance as a secondary objective, whereas Intel's are descendants of powerful desktop/server chips, that got power-saving features added in over the years. Maybe that approach is just inherently harder.

More likely though, Intel's economic incentives just weren't as strong to actually improve power consumption, what with them having had a monopoly on laptop chips. AMD not being able to do it either could probably be explained by the fact that it doesn't and never had anywhere near the budget of Intel or Apple. They were just barely hanging on by making (consumer/gaming) desktop CPUs and console chips, which aren't that big of a market compared with servers and laptops, and (the latter especially) have shit margins, and both are more about performance and less about saving watts.

Intels entire strategy was force everyone to use intel everywhere using coercion then do precisely fuck all for 10 years then at the end of those 10 years try to charge CPU DLC and accidentally releasing a good value CPU which people were having too much fun overclocking so they disabled the overclocking. There was no incentive to change they have a total monopoly.

AMD seem more geared towards entering the server market to unseat intel and the continued dominance in the gaming console and handheld market so APUs are the focus. Apple annoyingly always seems to be a market leader so nobody would have made something like the M4 macbook air until after apple makes it. Well the rest of the industry will try to anyway but fail because windows is never gonna be anywhere near as efficient.

I feel like Linux with more investment into intelligent power management could probably compete with macbooks but the laptop power management side of linux is kinda doodooass and windows is windows. Its ok intel can have another crack at intel atom heh

I think they are quicker at putting the latest generation chip designs into consumer electronics.

That's why we don't see Snapdragon sweep in a similar fashion. Qualcomm makes impressive chips too but then doesn't manage to deliver devkits and when the laptops came out they weren't bad but already behind. And nothing for Linux users even when Qualcomm has promised to be better in the future.

Apple buys up the supply of cutting edge silicon fab from TSMC.

caught up in what way?