Given what the difference in computation power is between a computer with top-end nvidia card and top end CPU, the numbers suggest that if you have a heavy work task that you on such a system, start up in the evening, say 8 PM on a Monday, and have ready the next morning at 8 AM. The same task would not be ready until the following Monday at 8 PM on the M1.
The M1 itself is an SoC. It's composed of parts, however, which can stack.
Eg., just look at the M1 variations present atm: variable gpu cores.
The "chiplet" speculation is that given the M1's variable high-perf, low-perf and cpu cores, this can scale up.
Leaks at least are all pointing in a 32-core, Xeon-competitor direction. It is theoretically possible they could do the same with GPU count, and try to compete perhaps in the mid-pro gfx range.
Basically all silicon works like this. "Variable cores" actually means some cores are disabled. This is usually done to increase overall yields: chips with damage inside one of the cores can still be binned as the lower core count SKUs.
The "you can scale up" thing is actually just how e.g. Intel makes bigger monolithic chips (Xeon/HEDT) with the same or very similar cores as the desktop ones. Meanwhile AMD, actually using chiplets, can cheaply do something more like "scale out" in the sense that they put more of the exact same die on a package.
No. Nvidia still has a massive software lead over Apple, and probably will continue to until Apple gives in and supports Vulkan on MacOS. Furthermore, I find Apple's GPU performance on 5nm to be pretty disappointing. It's pretty comparable to the x86 Zen 2 integrated graphics, which came out 18 months before the M1, on laptops half the price, on the 7nm node. I think Apple has a long ways to go in GPU engineering before they can even stand toe-to-toe with the industry.
