With industry-leading performance, powerful features and incredible energy efficiency, M1 is Apple's first chip designed specifically for the Mac.
Apple announced the most powerful M1 chip the company has ever created in early November. The M1 chip is optimized to meet the requirements of Mac systems for size and power efficiency. As a system on a chip (SoC), M1 brings together a number of very powerful technologies within a single chip, and it incorporates a unified memory architecture that dramatically increases performance and energy efficiency.
M1 is the first personal computer chip manufactured using a 5 nanometer etching process, and has no less than 16 billion transistors It incorporates a CPU with the best performance per watt in the world, and the graphics processor integrated the fastest in the world on a personal computer.
World's best performance per watt
The M1 chip is equipped with an eight-core central processor, which consists of four high-performance cores and four high-efficiency cores. Each high-performance core provides high speed for single-threaded tasks, while consuming as little power as possible. The four highly energy efficient cores deliver less performance but consume ten times less power. On their own, they provide performance similar to that of the previous generation dual-core MacBook Air, but they consume much less power.
These cores are the most efficient way to perform everyday, undemanding tasks like checking email or browsing the web. They preserve autonomy like never before. The new range of MacBook Air is capable, in surfing, of holding about twenty hours!
The world's fastest integrated graphics processor
With industry-leading performance and exceptional energy efficiency, the M1 chip's graphics processor is one of a kind. It incorporates up to eight powerful cores that can run nearly 25 threads simultaneously. It can handle even the most demanding tasks with ease, whether it's smooth playback of multiple 000K video streams or rendering complex 4D scenes. With 3 teraflops of throughput, the M2,6 chip is equipped with the world's fastest integrated graphics processor on a personal computer.
Blazing fast machine learning on the device
With the M1 chip, Apple's Neural Engine makes its appearance on the Mac, which considerably speeds up machine learning tasks. Based on Apple's most advanced 16-core architecture and capable of performing 11 trillion operations per second, the M000 chip's Neural Engine achieves machine learning (ML) performance up to at 1 times faster. The very design of the M15 chip stems from a desire to excel in machine learning: tasks such as video analysis, speech recognition and image processing reach a level of performance never before seen on Mac.
More innovative technologies integrated into the M1 chip
The M1 chip brings together high-performance, custom-designed technologies, including:
- Apple's latest Image Signal Processor (ISP), which delivers higher quality videos with better noise reduction, higher dynamic range and improved auto white balance;
- the latest Secure Enclave, which guarantees unparalleled security;
- a high performance storage controller, with a hardware AES encryption system providing faster and more secure SSD performance;
- efficient and energy-efficient multimedia encoding and decoding engines for exceptional performance and extended runtime;
- an Apple-branded Thunderbolt controller that supports USB 4, transfer speeds of up to 40 Gbps, and compatibility with more peripherals than ever before.
macOS Big Sur optimized for the M1 chip
macOS Big Sur is designed to make the most of the capabilities and power of the M1 chip, delivering increased performance, incredible battery life, and enhanced security features. Like the iPhone and iPad, the Mac now wakes instantly from sleep.
With Big Sur and the M1 chip, Mac users can take advantage of an even wider range of apps. All Apple software for Mac is now “universal” and runs natively on M1 systems. Existing Mac apps that haven't been updated to “universal” will run smoothly using Apple's Rosetta 2 technology. Finally, apps for iPhone and iPad can now run directly on Mac.
Furthermore, Big Sur's foundations are optimized to harness the full power of the M1 chip, including development technologies, from Metal for graphics to Core ML for machine learning.
Beginning of a two-year transition for the Mac
The M1 chip is fitted to the latest MacBook Air, 13-inch MacBook Pro and Mac mini. It's the start of a transition to a new family of chips designed specifically for the Mac. The transition to Apple silicon will take around two years, and these three systems are a truly exceptional first step.