Apple Silicon’s secret sauce is their heterogeneous computing strategy. Specialised components for specific workloads. PC gamers will know what I’m talking about: Nvidia was peddling GPUs designed to handle the specialised parallel workloads encountered by videogame graphics. The original M1 SoC goes up a level of abstraction, with different subsystems on the chip specialised for broad categories of computing task. Apple Silicon uses twin sets of CPUs to optimise power consumption for general computing workloads (those that aren’t dispatched to specialised components). The Firestorm CPUs are built to relentlessly execute time-sensitive workloads requested by the user, while the Icestorms are built to handle less urgent work more slowly.