Unlikely that there would be any big gains on the mobile side, and this being their first desktop chip, they probably didn’t want to rock the boat.
Apple nailed this, unbelievably. I have an M1 MacBook and it’s truly black magic. It’s already the fastest computer I’ve ever used. I’d rather have stability during the Rosetta 2 stage than added complexity and bugs by introducing a new bleeding edge instruction set.
I suppose, but couldn't the same be said for the early 64-bit transition on Arm for Apple? They don't seem scared about biting off complexity today when they know they'll need it eventually.
The other side of this is that we're now in a window where performance-sensitive developers are motivated to start looking at NEON and adding NEON support to existing SIMD code. Which is fine... but if SVE is the long-term answer and SVE will (as its goal) support better performance scaling of SIMD code with future processors, it seems like there's a real motivation for Apple to push developers into doing things "the right way" as early as possible.
Assuming (!) that SVE is indeed the future, missing it for the first few generations is shades of 32-bit-Intel-for-Apple -- a stop-gap with some remarkably long-tailed support costs, compared to jumping straight to x64.
Apple nailed this, unbelievably. I have an M1 MacBook and it’s truly black magic. It’s already the fastest computer I’ve ever used. I’d rather have stability during the Rosetta 2 stage than added complexity and bugs by introducing a new bleeding edge instruction set.