Apple's high-performance M1 chip is the first of a family of processors that the company will use in its Mac lineup. So far, the 13-inch MacBook Air, 13-inch MacBook Pro, and the Mac mini have been upgraded with the M1. Within two years, Apple has promised to transition every Mac model to Apple Silicon. That means the larger MacBook Pro, the iMac and iMac Pro, and even the top of the line Mac Pro, will run on chips similar to the M1. Many might have previously thought that it would be impossible to achieve sufficient performance to compete with the best Intel and AMD CPUs, but Apple seems to have done it.

Apple has been pitching its A-series processors as being competitive with those found in PC laptops for several years. The first real suggestion that the tech giant would actually switch from Intel to its own chips came during the 2020 Worldwide Developers Conference, generating plenty of speculation about whether Apple Silicon could actually compete at that level. Many claim to have transitioned from working on a computer to an iPad Pro, but the majority still choose a laptop or desktop for professional use. With the unveiling of the M1, the somewhat hypothetical comparison of an iPad replacing a computer suddenly became a real challenge to the PC chip manufacturers, and if Apple Silicon really can outperform PC CPUs, Mac sales may see a rapid acceleration.

Related: Why Apple’s M1 Mac mini Is The Desktop To Beat In 2020

Apple’s M1 is a low-power system on a chip (SoC) and an excellent fit for a laptop or small enclosure desktops. It includes an eight-core CPU with four cores focused on power-efficiency and four designed for speed, which Apple claims provides the world’s best performance per watt. The efficiency cores are said to use one-tenth of the power of the performance cores, but each matches the previous generation’s MacBook with an Intel Core i3. All cores can be used together for intensive tasks and Apple claims triple the performance compared to the MacBook with an Intel Core i7. At the same time, battery life has increased dramatically. There are eight GPU cores, which are said to have six times the performance of Intel’s integrated graphics. The SoC has plenty of custom silicon, containing a 16-core Neural Engine, an image signal processor to improve video quality, Secure Enclave to prevent unauthorized access, a storage controller for hardware-based file encryption, video encoder/decoder engines, and a Thunderbolt controller that supports USB 4.

That’s a long list of components to pack onto one chip. The on-board memory cache can be accessed by all chip components, which eliminates the time and resources needed to copy data. The only limitation that has been identified so far, is the cap of 16-gigabytes of memory which, while generous compared to iPhone and iPad devices, lacks in comparison to previous MacBook Pro and Mac mini units with a maximum of 32 and 64-gigabytes, respectively.

Apple’s Advantage & The SoC Future

Apple M1 MacBook Air MacBook Pro bokeh background

The M1 chip is the result of over a decade of refinement. Over the years, Apple’s ARM-based design has been enhanced with more and more custom silicon delivering much higher single-core performance than ARM chips from Samsung or Qualcomm. Apple has the benefit of complete design control with its tablets and smartphones and this allows optimization of every hardware component, the operating system (OS), and a wide variety of apps. Apple has a degree of insight and control that few, if any, can claim to such a high degree. Improvements to a chip components are understood in a holistic manner, with consideration of how they may be implemented in the OS and software to improve performance throughout. When new components are added as custom silicon in a future generation, OS updates roll out simultaneously to make immediate best use of the improvements. It’s a significant advantage to have this top to bottom control rather than offering a chip improvement that is hoped to be picked up by the OS and app developers in the future.

The M1 chip is actually a system on a chip (SoC), so the CPU, GPU, Neural Engine, fast memory cache, controllers for external input and output, memory and storage, as well as several task-specific components are included. This isn’t new for mobile processors. Every iPhone, Apple Watch and iPad processor is also an SoC. In fact most mobile processors use an SoC for greater efficiency. Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8cx took a similar path as Apple, building from a mobile chip to a laptop computer chip. Intel’s new SoC Lakefield combines aspects of its unsuccessful Atom processor with its wildly successful Core CPU to compete with these new designs. However, the highest performance chips from Intel and AMD use discrete components, meaning they are separate from the CPU. Whether Apple Silicon will be able to compete at the highest level while using the SoC design remains to be seen, but Apple has committed to a complete transition within two years. By 2022, the first Mac Pro using Apple Silicon should be on the market, if not sooner. At present, Apple is exuding supreme confidence, suggesting even more impressive chip announcements are coming in 2021 and beyond.

Next: M1 CPU Performance: Just How Powerful Is Mac’s New Apple Silicon Chip?

Source: Apple