Apple unveils its first computer chip, the M1
Latest update time：2021-09-06 02:36
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Apple, a company that turns its press conferences into a TV series, finally announced this year's "One More Thing" at 2 a.m. Beijing time on November 11, 2020 - the M1 chip, as well as the MacBook Air, MacBook Pro, and Mac mini equipped with the M1 chip.
It seems to be a routine learned from Chinese TV dramas, where things that can be discussed in one episode are discussed separately. Apple Silicon, which has been warming up since WWDC on June 23, has gone through many press conferences, causing people to speculate, imagine and gnash their teeth endlessly. It seems that it has not been a failure. This M1 chip can be regarded as the biggest release of Apple's ambition to make chips, so much so that it competes with Double 11 for traffic.
How powerful is the M1?
There is no doubt that the M1 chip is the biggest highlight of this conference and all of Apple's conferences this year. This is a low-power SoC, and Apple claims it has opened a new era for Mac.
First of all, the biggest feature of M1 is integration. It integrates CPU, GPU, I/O, security functions, storage, etc. It also uses a unified memory architecture or UMA to encapsulate high-bandwidth, low-latency memory together. When accessing the same data, there is no need to copy between memories. This greatly improves performance and power consumption.
M1 is the first 5nm computer chip with 16 billion transistors. In terms of CPU, Apple said that each core is designed to run a single task or thread as efficiently as possible while ensuring maximum performance.
With eight CPU cores, including four high-performance large cores and four high-efficiency small cores, Apple claims that it can provide excellent performance with only one-tenth of the power. Thanks to these four high-efficiency cores, its performance is comparable to the current dual-core MacBook Air.
In addition, at the online press conference, the style and sound effects of the words "highest performance per watt" were quite similar to the effect that Xiaomi produced with a 1,999 yuan price tag.
The M1 can provide twice the performance of the latest laptop chips at a power consumption of 10W, and the energy efficiency is up to three times.
In terms of GPU, it also uses an 8-core design, including 128 execution units, supports up to 24,576 concurrent threads, and has a floating-point performance of up to 2.6TFlops. Apple is still balancing performance and power consumption, and said that general integrated graphics cards cannot achieve such a balance. The M1 is said to have the fastest integrated GPU in the world, and its performance is twice that of the latest notebook chips at 10W power consumption.
In addition, M1 integrates a 16-core neural engine to achieve 11 trillion operations per second. It also has new hardware encryption and biometric features, supports Thunderbolt and USB-4 ports, Secure Enclave security module, machine learning accelerator, high-quality ISP, etc.
At the same time, in order to give full play to the performance of M1, macOS Big Sur also debuted. It enables the new generation of Macs to wake up as quickly as iPhones and iPads, and the Safari browser responds 1.9 times faster. Thanks to the unified memory architecture of the M1 chip, applications can call more video memory in macOS Big Sur, thereby bringing better graphics processing capabilities. At the same time, there is also the hardware-based secure startup and automatic encryption of the M1 chip.
With macOS Big Sur and the M1 chip, Mac users have access to more apps than ever before. All Mac software developed by Apple is now Universal and runs natively on M1 systems.
Apple said the new macOS Big Sur will be updated on November 12.
In terms of specific products, the 13-inch MacBook Air equipped with M1 is thin and light, claiming that the CPU speed is 3.5 times faster and the graphics processing speed is 5 times faster. The MacBook Air will be 3 times faster than the best-selling Windows notebook of the same level, and faster than 98% of notebook PC products. In terms of screen, the 13-inch screen supports P3 wide color gamut, the keyboard supports Touch ID and cancels the Touch Bar design, and the official battery life is up to 18 hours. The price of the new MacBook Air starts at 7999 yuan.
The 13-inch MacBook Pro is also equipped with an M1 chip. Apple claims that the CPU performance is 2.8 times better than the previous generation, and the GPU is 5 times better, and it can edit 8K videos. In terms of battery life, it can meet 17 hours of web browsing time and 20 hours of video playback time. The battery life is 10 hours longer than the previous generation, making it the MacBook notebook with the longest battery life. In terms of price, the MacBook Pro is available in 256GB and 512GB storage capacities, priced at 9,999 yuan and 11,499 yuan respectively.
In addition, the performance of Mac mini has also been greatly improved, which is three times that of the previous Mac mini equipped with a quad-core Intel chip, and the graphics performance has reached 6 times that of the previous generation. You can choose 256GB and 512GB storage capacity, priced at 5299 yuan and 6799 yuan respectively.
At the beginning of the press conference, Cook said that Mac's business grew by 30% last quarter and attracted 50% of new buyers. Of course, this may be short-lived, after all, the epidemic has increased users' demand for working and studying at home, which has led to a certain increase in notebook sales. But this is not the point. The point is that Apple has brought its self-developed chips to an unprecedented height in Apple's history.
The tough Mac chip
Historically, Apple's Mac product line has completed multiple hardware platform migrations. Between 1994 and 1996, Apple chose to stop using the 68K processor launched by Motorola and instead used the PowerPC processor jointly developed and launched by the AIM Alliance (Apple, IBM, and Motorola).
This platform migration took several years. During this period, Apple launched the Mac OS operating system that could run on both 68K processors and PowerPC processors, and created a low-level emulator for Mac computers equipped with PowerPC processors, encouraging third-party developers to create programs that could run natively on both platforms.
In 2003, when Jobs launched the Mac with the PowerPC G5 processor, he boasted that "within twelve months, the clock frequency of the PowerPC processor will be increased to 3 GHz."
In fact, the product did not, and Apple once again fell in love with another company. At the 2005 WWDC conference, Jobs officially announced that Apple would stop using PowerPC microprocessors provided by Motorola and IBM in Mac computers in the future, and instead use x86 processors provided by Intel, which most of Apple's competitors chose.
Previously, Semiconductor Industry Watch published an article analyzing the advantages of Apple using self-developed chips on Mac:
1. Reduced dependence on customers; 2. Control of chip performance to differentiate itself from competitors; 3. The underlying technology of Mac, iPhone and iPad is consistent, so developers can use all the same technology; 4. Cost advantage.
Interestingly, Intel once suffered a defeat in the mobile processor field, but this time Apple wants to expand the Arm architecture chip from the mobile terminal to the computer side, which is a bit ironic. Intel lost in the battle of mobile processors. Power consumption is only a small reason. After all, technical problems can be solved with time. The main reason is that Intel obviously does not have the advantage to seize the market in the fast-iterating Arm mobile processor. Apple, with its unique rhythm, technical strength and closed ecological loop, seems to be able to make the Arm chip Mac a complete choice for consumers, but in the end, it still depends on the product experience and market competition.
Suddenly, I have another layer of worry. Will there be more "APPLE YES" comments in the comments section of Intel and AMD articles in the future? This will give the already timid PC CPU market another reason to be sad.
*Disclaimer: This article is originally written by the author. The content of the article is the author's personal opinion. Semiconductor Industry Observer reprints it only to convey a different point of view. It does not mean that Semiconductor Industry Observer agrees or supports this point of view. If you have any objections, please contact Semiconductor Industry Observer.
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