Apple has been working on ARM since before 1993, far longer than anyone other than ARM themselves

Apple helped Acorn Computers co-found ARM (Apple-supplied millions in investment and owned 20% of ARM)

Apple was the first company to actually use an ARM processor in a consumer product, in the 1993 Apple Newton MessagePad

Apple has been working on developing ARM as a next-generation processor since before 1993

Intel has not changed its old fashioned thinking so its processors (and AMD) are still fully dependent on old designs which are huge, run extremely hot, and use massive amounts of power

Apple expended billion of dollars to assemble a world-class chip design team and to put decades of time into creating a processor (family) that uses the latest 21st Century techniques and thinking, to deliver a processor that is faster, smaller, and cooler than all of Intel’s and AMD’s ancient offerings

Conclusion:

Apple has developed a better processor because Apple cares enough to invent into creating the kind of processor that Apple customers need and want.

What are the pros and cons of the new Apple M1 chip?

It’s blazing fast. Goes like clappers. Faster, according to benchmarks, than any equivalent Intel offering.

It’s almost unbelievably power efficient, using half the power (or less!) of similar Intel chips.

Its onboard graphics beats most midrange discrete GPUs.

It has a built-in machine learning/neural net processor, something you can’t get at all from Intel or AMD processors.

It is a call to arms for Intel to up their game.

How powerful is the Apple M1 chip?

The M1 was designed for a power-efficient, on-the-go application in Macbooks. So considering that, it’s a superb chip for 90% of the target audience.

Because the M1 chip is an SoC, or “System On a Chip” – and is designed to be task-specific and engineered to work with the operating system, unlike the Intel chips which are “off the shelf” parts.

In short, the CPU (central processing unit), GPU (graphics processor), DRAM (memory), and a few other processors share the same chip. The result is somewhat counter-intuitive – most people would assume separate components would be better-performing, the opposite is true with this chip.

Why?

Its integrated design allows the different processors to communicate with each other much faster. There’s less physical space that signals have to travel, and its integrated design makes memory available to both processors.

In layman’s terms, all the necessary resources are within reach. You can reach for a cell phone in your pocket much faster than having to run to a different room to answer the phone mounted on a wall. It requires less energy for the various system components to communicate with each other.

With efficiency comes more speed and less power consumption, and less heat.

However, there are perceivable drawbacks as well. For example, you can’t upgrade your RAM. Certain apps that you could run on an Intel-based MAC (including an emulated instance of Windows x64) aren’t going to happen.

In short, it’s like a super-duper iPad or iPhone that is designed to run macOS – and since it was designed specifically for the task, it can do it better than most Intel chips.

I hope this was general enough to understand.

All of the reviews have proven that Apple’s Apple Silicon processors are in fact much more powerful than Intel’s CPUs.