There were a lot of things said about the Apple M1 – often quite fantastic. Last month, I had the opportunity to try out the new Apple Macbook Pro with the M1 processor – and yes, I think that’s a sign of a big change.
The processors that accompanied us on our journey through history have changed over time. After an era of successful 8-bits, such as the MOS 6502 (1975) or the Zilog Z80 (1978), came the legendary Motorola 68000 (1979) – and yes, at that time, in the late 1980s, everyone more or less laughed at Intel processors. They laughed at them until the advent of Intel 80386 (1985), which brought enough performance for demanding applications. And then, of course, with the advent of the Intel 80486 (1989), which first offered top performance for engineers – and as prices fell, so did performance for modern games, both 2D and 3D, though without acceleration yet.
And at that time, among other things, thanks to a flood of x86-compatible processors from all sorts of companies – not only AMD, but also Cyrix, IDT or Chips and Technologies, the x86 architecture dominated the market and became dominant. At that time, without any fun, the x86 architecture was a source of ridicule not only among experts, but also in technical schools – all enchanted by the new RISC architectures or transputers. This is no joke, in the lectures I heard a lot of sometimes kinder, sometimes quite harsh comments on the address x86.
The x86 architecture contained too many “legacy” elements and carried a backpack of various oddities – compared to the 68K architecture, for example, it looked complicated, confused and confusing, and the operating systems used diametrically different x86 modes as if they were several different processors stitched together. The classic joke said that “The Pentium is like a rocket with a fighter built in, it has a car, a wheel in it – and even if it looks like a rocket, you can still pedal in it.”
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