Anyone know if M1 is just a small first step and we're going to see big uptick in performance from here - or have we seen the big leap and we're back to 10% improvement a year from now on.
It's "only" running at a peak of around 3.2ghz, though, so there's a lot of clear theoretical headroom on that front. But whether or not things like their cache or other subsystems can handle higher frequencies is unknown. But clocking up to ~4.5ghz turbo would be a potentially large gain - at the cost of also a huge uptick in power consumption, though, so Apple may just decline to go that route entirely, at least on their mobile CPUs.
How high they can go really depends on the process. TSMC 7FF silicon didn't go that high early on, max clocks really were improving as the process matured. This was very noticeable with AMD Zen 2, early dies topped out at ~4.2 (for all cores on the die), later ones often easily take ~4.4.
What we don't know is if the M1 can actually run at those frequencies, too, or if there's other bottlenecks that prevent the M1 from clocking higher than it does.
There is likely to be a couple more big performance jumps similar to this when Apple releases versions of this with more cores.