Apple M6 bumps cores to 12 with two super cores; CPUs keep improving fast

lemire · x · 2026-09-19

Daniel Lemire breaks down the new Apple M6: core count rises from 10 to 12 with two new super cores and slightly higher bandwidth, and he expects another performance jump. He contrasts SIMD data parallelism — AMD Zen 5 has four 512-bit units vs Apple's four 128-bit ones — while noting Apple's new 512-bit SME matrix unit, arguing CPUs are far from boring and improving fast.

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