M1 is Apple’s first Mac computer processor

As soon as Apple’s “One More Thing” conference was held, the official directly announced the star of today’s event, the M1 chip. This is the first Apple processor designed specifically for Mac computers. It is based on a 5nm process, contains 16 billion transistors and uses an architecture of high performance 4 cores and high efficiency 4 cores. According to Apple, the M1’s large high-performance core is “the world’s fastest CPU core” and is also “the world’s most powerful per watt”.

At the same time, M1 is also equipped with up to eight-core GPUs, which can provide up to 2.6TFLOP computing power. Compared to the latest PC display core, it can bring double the performance, but the power consumption is only a third, Apple calls it “the world’s fastest display core”. Unsurprisingly, Apple has also prepared a 16-core NPU for this SoC, which can perform up to 11 trillion operations per second. Additionally, the M1 also supports Thunderbolt 4, PCI Express Gen 4, and NVMe storage and has general memory architecture, specialized media encoding and decoding engines, and security modules.

Of course, Apple doesn’t forget to point out that low power consumption is another major selling point of the M1. On the new MacBook Air, announced at the same time as the chip, the official Wi-Fi web browsing battery life was up to 15 hours, and the battery life for looped videos was 18 hours. In contrast, Apple says current Intel chip-based products of the same grade can only reach a maximum of 11 and 12 hours in these scenarios.

According to Apple, all current first party software has been optimized for the M1 chip and its operational performance is claimed to have been improved in all directions. Take Final Cut as an example – its speed on M1 devices is six times faster than on x86 computers. As mentioned above, computers using M1 can run iOS and iPadOS apps directly. Heavy developers like Adobe have promised to update their M1 software later this year. In addition, Apple has also confirmed that new Mac computers equipped with M1 will bring Rosetta 2 into the factory. With its help, existing x86 software can be better transformed, reducing user problems during the transition period.