Apple M1, Apple's First Custom ARM SoC Has Arrived

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• Apple M1, Apple's First Custom ARM SoC Has Arrived

Apple's custom silicon has been rumored for years, but the Cupertino giant has finally given us real-world information about the Apple M1, the SoC behind the switch to ARM. Like many other ARM chips already on the market, the CPU is an 8-core chip with a BIG small configuration, with 4 high-performance cores and 4 energy-efficient cores. Apple also packs an 8-core GPU into the SoC, which is expected to be more powerful than the Intel Iris graphics found in lower-end MacBooks. Apple has yet to reveal which MacBooks will be powered by this custom chip, and Apple hasn't released a ton of specific information on specs beyond "16 billion transistors" and "5nm," which don't mean much by themselves. With the Apple M1 chip, Apple is making some pretty bold claims, claiming its performance is up to 3.5x compared to "competitive processors", though we're not sure what level of performance Apple is aiming for. Apple also claimed that the Apple M1 is 3 times more powerful per watt than the "latest laptop PC chip", which is also incredibly vague. What's impressive, though, is that Apple has apparently made its own Thunderbolt controller, which means that even if it ditch Intel for its entry-level computing products, they'll still have access to Thunderbolt. Fortunately, with pre-orders for the new MacBook Air, MacBook Pro 13, and Mac mini available today, it won't be long before we get to test Apple's performance for ourselves.

What does it mean?

Apple has made some pretty bold claims about the speed and durability of its new SoC, and at first glance, it seems incredibly scalable. It can run fanless on MacBook Air and scale to desktop performance on Mac mini. However, Apple only provided very vague comparisons to existing hardware, stating that its new SoC was simply faster than the latest laptop chips, without going into details about the laptop chip itself. faster: there is more than one. So while Apple's monumental claims of exponentially faster performance and increased efficiency seem super impressive at first glance, they ultimately don't mean much until we know what Apple actually compared its new chip to. . And it's unlikely that we ever will. Fortunately, we should have these laptops in our labs for a full suite of tests to see what they can do, so we won't have to wait too long to see if Apple's performance claims are accurate. Keep in mind that this first generation of Apple-built ARM processors for MacBooks may very well be just like any other first-generation product, with poor performance and plenty of bugs to fix. Until we know what these newer computers can do, our advice is not to jump on Apple's new line of processors.