Affected by the epidemic, Apple’s autumn conference was divided into three bands. The last wave of “One More Thing” officially announced the Apple Silicon chip previously announced at WWDC 2020 and officially named it M1. The chip was developed by TSMC and is 5nm. The manufacturing process, 8 large + 4 small ARM architecture, not only is more efficient but also all the Macbook series notebooks are completely innovated, which has given the industry a big blow.
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M1 chip specially designed for Apple computers
M1 is the first chip designed by Apple specifically for the Mac. For consumers, there may be two questions: “Will it crash when you use it?” and “Will the performance be better than that of a chip made specifically for Intel is still bad?”
In response to these two issues, Apple spent a lot of time introducing them. First of all, in terms of performance, the company pointed out that the M1 chip is mainly optimized for Mac systems. It uses 5nm process technology and 16 billion transistors, and the system architecture provides 8-core CPU, 8-core GPU, and 16-core Apple’s independent architecture. The neural network engine can provide up to 3.5 times the CPU performance, 6 times the GPU performance, and 15 times the machine learning speed compared to the past, and has 2 times the battery life of the previous Mac,
It also allows developers to build apps almost 3 times faster than in the past. It is the most advanced chip the company has loaded on computers so far. The company further explained that M1 has a processing capacity of 2.6 trillion floating-point operations per second and has the fastest integrated graphics processor in the world’s personal computers. The 8-core GPU on the chip can execute nearly 25,000 threads at the same time, and even complex 3D scene design work can be easily handled. From the follow-up introduction, you can see that Macbook Air and Mac Mini use M1 chips, which means these portable computers have complex 3D scene computing capabilities.
In terms of AI computing, the neural network engine in M1 has Apple’s most advanced 16-core architecture, which can perform 11 trillion operations per second, and the machine learning performance can be up to 15 times faster than before. Apple emphasizes that the entire M1 chip is designed to give full play to machine learning technology. The ML accelerator in the CPU and GPU complement each other, making Mac’s video analysis, voice recognition, and image processing performance better than before. better. In terms of stability, from the official commentary, in the past, Mac series products would rely on multiple chips to handle CPI, I/O, security management, and other functions, but this time M1 integrates all of these.
In addition, M1 also has a unified memory architecture that can integrate a single memory pool with high bandwidth and low latency in a custom package. From the perspective of system management and resource allocation, this design is expected to bring greater stability and faster processing efficiency to the computer, and even the machine can therefore have a longer life. In terms of power consumption, according to Apple’s explanation, the M1 has a total of 4 high-efficiency cores. In addition to the performance improvement, the power consumption is 1/10 of the previous. Moreover, these 4 high-efficiency cores require very low power consumption and can output a performance comparable to this generation of dual-core MacBook Air. If you usually just send and receive emails, browse the web.
The macOS Big Sur operating system optimized for M1
The most attractive part of Apple products is the integration of software and hardware. After the introduction of the M1 chip, Apple does not have to be constrained by third-party chip manufacturers. This also allows the internal operating system development department to fully cooperate and integrate resources with the chip development department. There is also a small point in this conference. The official announcement is: “iPhone and iPad apps can now be executed directly on the Mac.” This means that if you play games on the iPhone and run out of power, you can change to the Macbook.
Apple emphasized that the new generation of macOS Big Sur with M1 will bring unprecedented smoothness and efficiency to the system. In addition to allowing computers to wake up from sleep faster, just like mobile phones or tablets, the execution speed of JavaScript is now up to 1.5 times faster, and the response speed is nearly 2 times faster. In addition, Mac users can also execute more types of applications than ever before. In addition, the official also announced that Mac users with M1 chips can execute more types of apps than before. All Mac software developed by Apple is now in Universal form and can be executed natively on the M1 system.
Existing Mac apps that have not yet been updated to Universal will be perfectly executed through Apple’s Rosetta 2 technology, and the infrastructure of Big Sur has also been optimized to fully utilize the powerful capabilities of M1, including Metal for graphics and Developer technologies such as Core ML for machine learning. The first laptops using the M1 chip include MacBook Air, 13-inch MacBook Pro, and Mac mini, and Apple once again confirmed that all its Mac series products will be converted to use its own-developed chips within 2 years. This sentence also means one thing: “Apple is not trying to develop its architecture chip, it is serious.”
MacBook Air with M1 chip can chase drama for 18 hours
The Macbook Air released this time is also a 13-inch model that supports a wide color gamut Retina display. Compared with the RGB model, the display color is increased by 25%. The body also uses a backlit magic keyboard, with Touch ID unlocking, and supports WiFi 6 network connection, but two Thunderbolt ports support USB 4 on the side. Next is the key point. Compared with the previous generation model, the 8-core CPU has the fastest performance of 3.5 times, the 8-core GPU has the fastest graphics processing speed of 5 times, and the ML workload speed has increased by 9 times. The storage device controller and the latest flash technology can provide the fastest SSD performance up to 2 times, and the highest can be equipped with 2TB storage space. If the video is also played continuously, the battery life is up to 18 hours, which is more than before It took a full 6 hours.
