In a heart-pounding launch event, Apple unveiled the first-ever ARM-based chipset for laptops/desktops in its Apple Silicon family. Introduced with Apple MacBook Air, Apple Mac Mini, and Apple MacBook Pro, the new Apple M1 chipset is all-powerful. It is touted as having world’s fastest CPU core with high power-efficiency and performance on-board.
Introducing the new Apple M1 chipset
Talking about the new Apple M1 chip, it is manufactured using the 5nm node consisting of 16 billion transistors. Apple A14 chipset that shipped with iPhone 12 series arrives with 11.8 billion transistors. Thus, Apple M1 chipset performs exceptionally high. It has a similar ARM-based architecture as mobile chipsets where the same memory is shared across CPU, GPU, I/O controllers and others without the need to route it through PCIe.
As per the architecture, Apple M1 chip for Macs comprises four big and four small cores. The four big cores have 12MB of shared L2 cache while the small cores have 4MB of L2 cache. According to the launch event, Apple M1 is twice as performance when compared to the latest laptop chip although Apple didn’t name it. In fact, the chipset can perform even further surpassing the 10W TDP when it gets sufficient cooling.
The GPU on-board Apple M1 chipset for Mac has eight cores producing a performance of 2.6 TFLOPS which is exceptionally high when compared to the Nvidia 1050 Ti. Proceeding further, M1 is equipped with a 16-core Neural Engine that performs machine learning algorithms at an exceptional high of 11 TOPS. We have an image signal processor and a secure enclave integrated with M1 that eliminates the separate T2 security chip.
But there’s a catch. Although the new Apple M1 chipset performs exorbitantly on the new MacBook Air, MacBook Pro, and Mac Mini, it supports RAM of up to 16GB only. It doesn’t supports 32GB RAM as of previous gen Intel-powered chipsets. If you are looking for higher RAM, you’ll have to go through with the previous gen Mac devices. If you are looking for excellent performance and power efficient, check out the lineup right away.
