Diez años tras el lanzamiento del primer chip desarrollado por Apple, el sistema A4 en un chip, en el iPad y el iPhone cuatro, Apple presentó su M1 SoC para computadoras personales. Lanzado en el mes de noviembre de dos mil veinte, el procesador basado en ARM emplea exactamente la misma arquitectura básica que los chips de la serie A y nutre una pluralidad de Apple ordenador, incluidas MacBook Air, Mac mini, MacBook Pro y también iMac. Ahora, con el lanzamiento de los modelos MacBook Pro dos mil veintiuno de Apple, el M1 Pro y el M1 Max se han unido al muy querido chip M1.
So what happens when you put an iPhone processor in a Mac? It kills off the best-performing mass-market laptops on the planet that, on paper at least, beat anything you can get based on Intel or AMD. But the new processors are clearly not exactly the same as the chips in the iPhone.
Not an iPhone chip
Look and you will see the difference. While Apple's A- and M-series processors are built on ARM's reference architecture and build on what the company has learned about chip design, the Mac versions are a different beast. They are not a phone chip in a computer. It's obviously the same basic architecture, but built to be slightly different between different platforms. The M1 Pro and M1 Max take the winning M1 formula and improve on it. These chips allow Apple to introduce a unified memory architecture for the Mac. This means that the GPU, CPU, and everything else share the memory pool, which gives performance benefits since data doesn't need to bounce between the GPU and CPU memory.
If not, how exactly are they different?
Obviously, Mac chips are bigger than iPhone ones. But they are different in another way. You see, while iPhone chips are designed to deliver performance and battery life by balancing CPU efficiency, GPU efficiency, and power, Mac chips are taking a slightly different direction, making commitments more focused on performance. (That's not to say energy isn't a priority.) That's why you'll always get just as good performance from a new MacBook Pro when running on battery power as when you connect it to AC power. You don't get that in the high-end gaming systems that Apple equips its new MacBook Pro chips with. Yes, some of these machines do improve the performance of these Macs, but not by much. AnandTech has some of the best detailed reports I've read, specifying more details about these processors.
What about efficiency cores?
Eagle-eyed viewers will have noticed that the M1 Pro and M1 Max house fewer cores of processor power than those found in the M1. I think this reflects another design resolution on the company's part: for business users it was more essential to dedicate system cores to performance. Hence these Macs are such excellent machines. The leftover performance cores still do a lot of useful low-level work, but Apple clearly thinks that business users want to get things done, and so they've focused on performance. Every transistor is valuable, and the decision to dedicate more cores to performance reflects this thinking. These designs also reflect decisions that Apple's silicon development teams made a few years ago. It's a thought that's sure to shed light on how the company plans to develop Mac processors over the next few years. Apple is planning this kind of thing. It did not take the resolution to manufacture M1 chips last week; It's a plan that goes back years.
Why will I be procuring the Mac Pro at WWDC
Just as the larger iMac models, the Pro and Max, are now so plain to see, it's the Mac Pro that represents Apple's next chance to show us what its processor development can do. Bloomberg's Mark Gurman tweets that the Mac Pro will ship in 2 iterations equipped with 2 and 4 times more CPU and GPU cores than the M1 Max. That's up to 1 processor cores and 4 high-end GPU cores, he said. His comment produced a wave of speculation. The math behind his statement suggests that future Apple Mac Pros will feature dual or quad M1 Max processors. While it's unclear what performance we're going to see achieved by putting XNUMX bloated MXNUMX variation chips into these Macs, we know that battery life isn't going to be a performance drag since they're plugged into the field. We can also speculate about the markets these things are targeting: sci-tech, high-end photo and video projects, machine learning development, medicine, architecture, composition, analytics, data, AR development, and experience design. All of these uses will benefit from the incredible performance that the chip offers, particularly in multithreading, with a graphics architecture reinforced by integration at the OS level. This promised leap in Mac performance means that teams at Apple are also going to focus on the systems integration that Mac Pros need to get the most out of these chips. In itself, this also suggests we should be moving forward essential APIs for AI, AR, motion, scenery, object detection, and more, all now surely slated for an announcement at WWDC XNUMX. While I really don't expect the Mac Pro to make an appearance at the developer event (although there's some joy if it does), we'll be able to find out more about what these Macs offer by looking at the improvements they've made. to macOS at that moment.
Preaching to the choir
With that in mind, the current year's MacBook Pros and the M1-series chips they possess should be considered evangelists for the next big leap. As a Mac user who has been paying attention to new models since the Performa series, I couldn't be more thrilled that over the next twelve months, we're going to see what connecting hardware and devices can achieve. closely integrated with computers. equipped with probably the best processors in the industry. I imagine creative markets are going to explode into new possibilities and (if the claims about AR lenses are accurate) new creative occasions. That's even before estimating the M2 series processors and what happens when Apple switches to XNUMXnm chips. Follow me on Twitter or join me at the AppleHolic bar & grill and Apple discussion groups on MeWe.
<p>Copyright © dos mil veintiuno IDG Communications, Inc.</p>