Apple M4 sustains 10 instructions per cycle, beating most rivals; M5 speedup explained
lemire · x · 2026-09-19
Part 5/8 of Lemire's Apple Silicon series: the M4 can theoretically sustain 10 instructions per cycle — higher than most competitors — yielding more compute per cycle. The base M4 also adds two efficiency cores that help multicore rather than single-core performance. With little visible difference between M4 and M5 on these metrics yet M5 being significantly faster, he turns to memory bandwidth next.
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