Apple’s new ARM-based M1 processor explained

Dimapur, Nov. 11 (EMN): Apple announced three new Macs yesterday and all the devices are powered by its new in-house computer processor, the M1. That’s right, Apple is ditching Intel entirely for its new Mac line-up and it may make its own processors for all future Macs.

It hasn’t been a particularly good year for Intel with AMD stealing the show with its new Ryzen 5000 series of processors and now after powering Apple’s laptops and desktops since 2006, Intel has been ditched by Apple for the processing needs of its new Mac computers. Team blue’s hold on the CPU market is on the decline and it looks pretty grim for Intel especially after one of its biggest tech-partners in Apple seems to be on a mission to move out completely.

What is the M1 chip?

The M1 is Apple’s new in-house ARM-based processor that powers its latest Mac computers: the MacBook Air, the 13-inch MacBook Pro and the Mac Mini desktop computer.

The M1 has eight cores consisting of four high-performance cores with a shared 12MB L2 cache and four high-efficiency cores with a shared 4MB L2 cache. The chip has 16 billion transistors made possible via cutting-edge 5nm fabrication process. It also has an eight-core GPU capable of handling multiple 4K streams and a 16-core neural engine that’s capable of 11 trillion operations per second.

Finally, the processor has 16GB of in-built DRAM (Dynamic RAM) and Secure Enclave with AES encryption hardware.

Performance

Apple claims that its new Macs have a longer battery life than its predecessors. For instance, the new 13-inch MacBook Pro can reportedly deliver 20 hours of video playback time and 17 hours of wireless web browsing.

Apple insists that the M1 chip offers the “world’s best CPU performance per watt” and is 3.5 times faster than last-gen. These comparisons, to be honest, is kind of vague and it will take a lot of real-world tests to determine if Apple’s M1 chip is as competent as Apple says it is when compared with Intel’s or AMD’s processors in the market today.

One perk of the M1 chip is that it will allow the new Macs to run iOS apps natively because of the shared ARM architecture.

Apple also claims that the M1’s integrated GPU is no slouch. In a blog post, Apple wrote, “M1 includes Apple’s most advanced GPU. It benefits from years of analysis of Mac applications, including everyday apps and challenging pro workloads. With industry-leading performance and incredible efficiency, the GPU in M1 is in a class by itself. Featuring up to eight powerful cores capable of running nearly 25,000 threads simultaneously, the GPU can handle extremely demanding tasks with ease, from smooth playback of multiple 4K video streams to rendering complex 3D scenes. With 2.6 teraflops of throughput, M1 has the world’s fastest integrated graphics in a personal computer.”

Other tech features of the M1 chip via Apple:

• Apple’s latest image signal processor (ISP) for higher quality video with better noise reduction, greater dynamic range, and improved auto white balance.
• The latest Secure Enclave for best-in-class security.
• A high-performance storage controller with AES encryption hardware for faster and more secure SSD performance.
• Low-power, highly efficient media encode and decode engines for great performance and extended battery life.
• An Apple-designed Thunderbolt controller with support for USB 4, transfer speeds up to 40Gbps and compatibility with more peripherals than ever.

Negative points about the M1 chip

Apple’s M1 chip features an integrated memory process which it calls “unified memory architecture.” It means faster processing times but at a huge cost: You are essentially stuck with only 16GB of RAM with no room for additional memory upgrades.

Second, there is no official support for external graphics cards. So, if you were thinking of upgrading the Mac Mini with external graphics cards then you are out of luck. Ouch!

The future

On paper, Apple’s M1 chip looks really promising especially if their claims about increased battery life holds true in the real world. But this transition from Intel to Apple Silicon does pose some few challenges. For instance, macOS apps will have to be re-written to run on the new ARM architecture since previous Macs were all powered by Intel processors which were based on x86 architecture.

Apple seems to be moving towards building more powerful processors for its high-end options and this raises questions about Intel’s future partnership with Apple. The high-end Intel-powered Macs are still vastly more powerful than the new Macs and it will be interesting to see how Apple navigates through the myriad of problems that a transition such as this brings.

Is Apple going replace Intel processors for its high-end computers as well? What about support for existing Intel-powered Macs? These questions are frankly quite hard to answer right now. For what’s worth, the space between mobile devices and PCs is shrinking. iOS mobile apps built for smaller phone screens can now run natively in your 13-inch MacBook Pro and Apple Macs can wake up in an instant like an iPhone. And we thought 2020 couldn’t get any weirder.