Impact of a 32 Core Apple Silicon SoC?

If the rumors are correct and Apple releases a System on a Chip with 32 cores, how will that affect the market?

Okay, so I feel like doing some speculation today. How powerful would a 32 core Apple Silicon chip be? It is impossible to get an accurate answer to this question, but let us do a crappy back of an envelope type of calculation.

Fast or Slow Cores?

Before diving in I need to clarify some common misconceptions about Apple ARM chips. They use what we call big-little architecture. The Current 8-core M1 chips have 4 powerful cores called Firestorm and 4 weak cores called Icestorm. Why have weak cores at all? Because they consume a lot less power. Thus when workloads are light, Apple’s M1 will switch to these low power cores to save your battery life. So when I say 32 cores, you may think that means 16 powerful ones and 16 weak ones. No, that is not the case. Once workload is low you don’t need lots of cores, so more powerful CPUs from Apple will not increase the count of Icestorm cores. The predictions are that these newer chips will still have 4 Icestorm cores. The core increase is all for Firestorm-like cores. Thus when speculating on performance, we should not look at the average for M1 cores, as it is pulled down a lot by having…