Apple’s Macs glide into the fast lane with M1 Apple Silicon

Some of us have been waiting for years for the event Apple wrapped up in under 50 minutes (and likely spent years preparing for). Macs are moving to ARM-based Apple Silicon, and the way the company sees it, the transition should be better for everyone.

What’s the M1 chip?

Apple was pretty aggressive when it introduced its new Apple Silicon Macs, which (as expected) deliver screaming performance, thanks in part to the 5-nanometer (nm) chips Apple has developed on ARM, and thanks also to the work of the company’s silicon design teams.

Some benchmarks:

• The new M1-powered MacBook Pro is now 3x faster than the best Windows notebook “in its class.” (It also has Wi-Fi 6 and Thunderbolt 4.0.)
• The M1-powered Mac mini is 10x faster than the top-selling PC desktop in its class.
• And the new MacBook Air with an M1 chip is faster than 98% of PC laptops sold in the last year, Apple boasted.

That’s the Mac/PC discussion right there. Apple knows it. It ended the event with a short reprise of its famous “Get A Mac” ads starring John Hodgman as PC. The point he made? Now that Apple’s shifted to its own chips, those PCs can no longer keep up.

The transition was no surprise

We’ve all expected Apple to deliver a new Mac chip based in some way on the A-series processors it uses in iPhones and iPads. Apple wasn’t too specific around the relationships between these silicon siblings, but it did detail the following about the M1 chip it’s putting inside these new Macs:

• The chip is a 5nm design, as is the A14 processor used in iPhones, iPads; it’s quite clearly a version of the design custom built for use in Macs, rather than mobile devices. I see it as a more robust sibling to the other chips.
• It’s also the first personal computer built with a 5nm chip, Apple observed.
• M1 is a complete SoC design, with processor, graphics, security and more all packed inside one super-powered 8-core chip.
• M1 uses a unified memory architecture which combines high-bandwidth, low-latency memory into a single pool within a custom package. That means all the tech in the SoC may access the same data without copying it between multiple pools of memory, improving performance and efficiency.
• You get four high-performance and four high-efficiency cores. The first deliver pro performance for single core tasks, and can be used together for boosted multi-thread performance.
• The high-efficiency cores handle all the everyday tasks like web surfing and email. And all eight chips can work together when you need to put your Mac to work.
• Graphics? The GPU inside the M1 has its own eight cores and can run almost 25,000 simultaneous threads. That means smooth 4K video playback, complex 3D and more. You’re basically looking at 2.6 teraflops of throughput.
• It boasts a 16-core Neural engine capable of handling 11 trillion operations per second. (I can’t help but point out that that is the equivalent of 11 XServes in every Mac – think what that can do for machine learning.)
• The performance-per-watt the chip can deliver means the first Apple Silicon MacBook Air has no fan, realizing a long-held ambition of Apple co-founder, Steve Jobs for a fan-free Mac – one that isn’t compromised.
• Apple says the M1 chip can deliver up to 3.5x faster CPU, up to 6x faster GPU, up to 15x machine learning capabilities and twice the battery life of previous systems.

But wait, there’s more: advanced power management, low-power video playback, HDR imaging and video processor, high-bandwidth caches, machine learning accelerators, a high-quality image signal processor (ISP), high-efficiency audio, fourth-generation PCI express and NVMe storage.