> It reminds me of Apple's impressive memory bandwidth figures for M1 Pro/Max, that were slightly soured when only a scant few real-world tasks fully took advantage of it.
Tangent, but... that's kind of missing the point. The M1 SoCs have tons of memory bandwidth to keep the GPU fed. The fact that this also gives the CPU more memory bandwidth than it can possibly use is a convenient benefit.
Oh, for sure; it's entirely a byproduct of engineering an SOC that needs high GPU bandwidth. That doesn't stop Apple from marketing it as a CPU boon though, and it certainly didn't stop starry-eyed HN readers from losing their minds over a spec that only a small handful of people care about. Even price-to-performance, a figure that hasn't been relevant for nearly 2 decades of commodity computing, is a better metric to advertise than memory bandwidth. People simply won't notice the difference.
Tangent, but... that's kind of missing the point. The M1 SoCs have tons of memory bandwidth to keep the GPU fed. The fact that this also gives the CPU more memory bandwidth than it can possibly use is a convenient benefit.