> Should you buy one of Apple’s M1 devices? Probably not - wait 6 months for the next round of hardware, and buy then. Most of the software ecosystem quirks will be worked out by then, and just about everything will work. For now, there are enough weird little broken corner cases that I’d suggest holding off unless you’re OK with that and want legitimately insane battery life and performance.
As all the well deserved criticism about the lack of support for alternative operating systems on M1 becomes louder, articles like these suggest Apple's answer - you want to run any other OS on it, virtualisation is our answer. (There's already another article on M1 here praising how well virtualised Windows runs on it).
The unified architecture, combined with the speed of the modules (4266 MHz LPDDR4X), combined with the close physical proximity to the CPU cores likely all contribute to the M1's memory performance.
In Apple's own words:
“M1 also features our unified memory architecture, or UMA. M1 unifies its high‑bandwidth, low‑latency memory into a single pool within a custom package. As a result, all of the technologies in the SoC can access the same data without copying it between multiple pools of memory. This dramatically improves performance and power efficiency." [0]
Probably the speed of the modules, the mbw[1] tool does copies to do its measurement, so the close proximity and reduced copies in the OS wouldn't be factors.
Wise words.