M1, and the future of the Mac

Apple has now built its own silicon chip into its latest product launches. It’s a powerful move…

- CHARLOTTE HENRY

Undeterred by physical events not being possible, Apple held virtual events in September, October, and November this year. Exciting products arrived at all of them, not least the iPhone 12 range, but it is likely that the final one of the three will have the most profound and long-lasting effect on Apple and its customers. Because it was during the One More Thing presentation at that event that Apple unveiled Macs using its own chip for the first time. That chip is the M1 and the latest 13-inch MacBook Air, 13-inch MacBook Pro, and Mac mini all now run using the new Apple silicon.

System on a chip

The M1 is, in fact, a system on a chip (SoC). It incorporates almost all the fundamental components of a computer, like the CPU, GPU, memory, USB controller, power management circuits, and wireless radios into one chip instead of them all being separately put together on a motherboard. This high level of integration means that an SoC uses much shorter wiring and, most significantly for users, requires a lot less power.

According to Apple, its new chip has a unified memory architecture that incorporates highbandwidth, low-latency memory into a single pool within a custom package. Consequently, all the technologies in the SoC can access the same data without needing to copy it between multiple pools of memory. This all contributes to improved performance and efficiency. Apple says that machines running the M1 chip offer CPU performance that is up to twice as fast at that on a PC laptop using the latest chip. The company has also stated that its devices can match peak PC performance using just 25% of the power.