Apple on Tuesday unveiled its new System on Chip M1 running on a MacBook Air, MacBook Pro 13” and Mac mini along with macOS Big Sur featuring universal apps and the ability to run iPhone and iPad apps directly on Mac.
The series of powerful innovations have been discussed in Apple circles for years. One of the biggest implications of the announcements is that Apple will be able to move beyond Intel chips for Mac, which gives Apple more control over its supply chain and, presumably, chip capabilities.
All three Macs with the M1 chip will be available Nov. 17, with the MacBook Air starting at $999.
Apple CEO Tim Cook said the combination of M1 with Big Sur “delivers mind-blowing performance, extraordinary battery life and access to more software and apps that ever before.” Cook and team rattled off a series of data points about greater power and capabilities of M1 and Big Sur.
It is difficult to discern whether M1 is more important than Big Sur in terms of innovations, but let’s start with M1:
M1 is the first PC chip built on 5-nanometer process technology. It combines processor, I/O, security and memory chips into one SoC for greater efficiency. There are 16 billion transistors, the most ever on a single chip for Apple, but who’s counting.
M1 also has Unified Memory Architecture, which means a single pool of data is used by all the functions in the SoC without the need to copy the data in multiple pools of memory. The result is better performance and power efficiency, something that analysts have promoted for a decade. Apple claimed UMA means nearly 4 times faster video processing and 7 times faster image processing when compared to a 1.2 GHz quad-core Intel Core i7.
Apple also claimed the M1’s 8-core CPU has 3.5 times faster performance than the same Intel Core i7 system. The eight cores are divided into two groups with four cores devoted to high-efficiency for lightweight tasks (at one-tenth the power) like checking email and four cores devoted to performance for multi-threaded work like gaming.
M1 also has an 8-core GPU, capable of running 25,000 threads at once. Apple said it compared its GPU capability against “the highest performing integrated GPUs for notebooks and desktops commercially available,” and didn’t name any vendors although Apple claimed 6x faster performance.
Another significant feature with M1: It includes Apple’s Neural Engine with 16 cores for 15X faster machine learning performance (compared to a quad-core Intel Core i3 system) for jobs like video analysis, voice recognition and image processing. Apple’s neural engine is also used in its smartphones.
All the capabilities with M1 enable double the battery life of previous-generation Macs, Apple said. Battery life is enhanced by Big Sur’s advanced power management features that allocate tasks between performance and efficiency cores. The MacBook Air with M1 will provide up to 15 hours of wireless web browsing and 18 hours of movie playback.
Also for Big Sur, all of mac software is now Universal and runs natively on M1 systems. Those existing Mac apps not updated to Universal will run on Apple’s Rosetta 2. Also, iPhone and iPad apps can now run directly on the Mac. These innovations have been promoted or rumored for years, and are important, but have come to be expected Apple capabilities.
Apple noted that the transition to M1 for other Macs will take about two years to complete.
Intel has made chips for Mac since 2005. TSMC is building the new M1 chips, as it already does for iPhone and iPad.
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