Apple Silicon M1 chip: Here’s what we know

It’s here: The Mac’s biggest day since Apple switched to Intel chips. Starting Nov. 10, Apple begins the transition to Apple Silicon with the first chip called the M1. Here’s what we know about it.

The M1 is an 8-core SoC (System-on-Chip) chip based on 5-nanometer architecture and comprising of 16 billion transistors. 

Inside the chip are four high-performance cores featuring 192KB of instruction cache, 128KB of data cache, and shared 12MB L2 cache. Backing these up are four high-efficiency cores with 128KB of instruction cache, 64KB of data cache, and shared 4MB L2 cache.

These, according to Apple, are the world’s fastest CPU cores, and allow the M1 to deliver the world’s best CPU performance per watt, offering twice the performance of the (unspecified) “latest PC laptop chip” at 10W at a quarter of the power consumption.

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The M1 also has up to eight GPU cores featuring 128 execution units, up to 24,576 concurrent threads, and 2.6 teraflops of performance, and it can output 82 gigatexels per second and 41 gigapixels per second.

Note: The lower-specced MacBook Air M1 features seven GPU cores.

Again, the GPU offers twice the performance of the (unspecified) “latest PC laptop chip” at 10W — this time at a third of the power consumption.

Then there’s the 16-core Neural Engine capable of 11 trillion operations per second, which will be used to boost the performance of software that leverages machine learning.

The new chip is headed to three of Apple’s best-selling Macs — the MacBook Air, the Mac Mini, and the 13-inch MacBook Pro — and Apple offered up some data on how the M1 boosted the performance of these devices.

By ZDNet Source Link