Now, more than ever, it seems like Nintendo's choice to ditch x86 and go exclusively for ARM for it's both, it's home console and its handheld, is a forward thinking move. With Apple pulling off an impressive feat with its first ARM-based Mac-based laptops, big and small developers have thrown their weight behind Apple, including MS, so much so that it makes the 2 years timeframe set Tim by to ditch Intel seems generous. This is great news for the Switch and Nintendo's future consoles and handhelds in general, as ARM seems to be the next generation architecture for desktop PCs, and many PC manufacturers will embrace it. 

I believe soon enough, Nintendo won't be the odd one, on the contrary, the question will be when MS and SONY will follow suit. 

No. Series X and PS5 just came out and use AMD. ARM is owned by Nvidia now. The next-gen refresh will use AMD of course. Who knows in 7 years when we get new consoles.

Nintendo choose ARM because it was the only possible choice for their hybrid form factor. But if you want more CPU performance in gaming, X86 is still the way to go.

Also, don't get too hyped over the performance for Apple's new Laptop chips.
First, they're one process in front of AMD and 2 in front of Intel with the 5nm process, so they had more headroom from that.
Second, comparisons with x86 CPUs get a bit unfair at this point: Apple emphasized the singlecore performance - but was actually comparing their singlecore vs Intel's singlethread performance. if you fill the core with 2 threads to make a correct core vs core comparison, then the old Intel chip still stayed in front.
Third, the new MacBook Air comes with a hefty 68W PSU, implying that the chip doesn't pull less power than their previous Intel chips (which had PSUs that were only rated to 62W)

The new Apple silicon is great, no doubt about that. But it's not the be all, end all that you seem to make out of it.

Microsoft is also only using the new ARM for their Surface tablets and laptops, which are supposed to have great battery life over pretty much everything else. But don't expect them to massacre the x86 chips, that simply won't happen.

With such a big push on Backwards compatibility from both MS and Sony, I see the move away from the x86 architecture as an extremely unlikely scenario.

Perhaps eventually. AMD has been working on some ARM stuff for years now behind the scenes. They likely will be able to supply PS and MS with it if it ever becomes a serious request.

Why would AMD use Nvidia chips going forward?

Don't bet on it.

Not exactly. There are other chips Nintendo could have opted for.

However... nVidia likely gave Nintendo a deal that was to good to pass up... But even before the Switch released there were chips available that could have beaten the old Maxwell Tegra.

I'm not an Apple fanatic, far from it.
However... Let's not get facts in the way of a good story.

In general the Apple M1 is beating the Ryzen 4700u in integrated graphics performance.
https://www.anandtech.com/show/16252/mac-mini-apple-m1-tested/3

Apple's M1 Firestorm cores is showcasing some very impressive floating point capabilities as well in single threaded workloads.
https://www.anandtech.com/show/16252/mac-mini-apple-m1-tested/4


The Firestorm cores are also dominating Intels best mobile chips in multi-threaded scenarios and trades places with AMD depending on test.
https://www.anandtech.com/show/16252/mac-mini-apple-m1-tested/5

Some more mixed benchies:
https://www.anandtech.com/show/16252/mac-mini-apple-m1-tested/2


In general... If the dataset is very cache and bandwidth heavy, x86 will definitely win... x86 also has the advantage of higher powerlevels to fall back into... But for all intents and purposes... We cannot confused Apples Firestorm cores as your typical ARM cores, they are very wide, high performant cores with many of the large x86 core design philosophies backing it, with much less of a power penalty.


You are right that the TSMC 5nm process does give Apple an advantage over AMD and especially Intel though.

Apples M1 chip is damn impressive, able to be competitive/beat Intel and AMD at a much smaller powerlevel.

At bolded: I was purely talking about CPU performance, since that is what the initial question was about. I know the GPU is much stronger than the one in the 4800U. But for the CPU, if we really compare core vs core and not core vs thread, then the M1 loses the CPU benchmarks despite being more modern.

At italic: Like I said, the new AMcBook Air has an even stronger PSU than the old one, so much smaller power level doesn't exactly sounds true. More likely is that due to the size of the SoC, it's much easier to cool. The old MacBook Air had a 45W rated cable, the new one is rated 61W, so the whole SoC definitely can pull more power if needed.

Yup. While backwards compatibility has been cyclical in gaming, it does seem like it's here to stay now. Even if PS6 and the 5th Xbox ditch physical games (likely), they will still want to support your digital library being carried over.

Video game hardware has been moving away from propriety hardware and re-inventing the architecture with each generation. They seem to want to make things as seamless as possible for developers and for backwards compatibility. Nintendo will be morons if Switch 2 doesn't have a similar architecture to Switch and support backwards compatibility. 

Those benchmarks you provided are showing it to be very competitive with AMD's hardware.

Either way, Single core benchmarks where you force an application to run on a single thread aren't even relevant anymore, even web-browsers and office suites use multiple cores these days.
Then again... It is wccftech.

And while you are right that the "rated cable" has increased, that doesn't mean that power consumption has increased, Apple may have wanted a PSU with headroom to allow for degradation in the unit for reliability reasons for example, need actual power consumption numbers and not just basing all your assumptions on PSU wattage.
My PC has an 850w PSU. It will *not* draw 850w.

Lets put things in perspective here... The M1 is in the same league. It will beat AMD Ryzen, it will loose some... And there are scenarios where x86 thanks to it's higher frequency, more bandwidth and larger caches will always hold an advantage.

But we also need to take a look at the multiples performance increase ARM SoC's have had just over the last couple of years where Intel has stagnated... Apples Monolithic ARM core is definitely in a position where it can start replacing x86 chips based on performance alone... And hence why they are making those moves.