The three-word iconic phrase introduced by Apple ‘One More Thing’ once again grabbed eyeballs at their recent event launch of MacBook models, powered by Apple Silicon. This is Apple’s first personal computer chip integrated with 5-nanometer process technology.
Apple announced the much-awaited breakthrough in the saga of Apple’s successful history and set a new benchmark with its newly introduced MacBook models: MacBook Air, the 13-inch MacBook Pro, and the Mac Mini – powered by Arm-based Apple Silicon processor – for better battery backup, greater power efficiency and faster performance – the amalgamation of powerful technologies into a single chip M1.
The virtual event took place at Apple Park of California. The presentation familiarises the consumer with a huge shift from the present Intel chipset in Mac OS. The event showcased Apple’s first custom-built chip M1 for all-new MacBooks and Macs, thereby adding another feather to its cap.
The prices of these Mac models range starts from $699 to $1299: Mac Mini priced at $699, MacBook Air at $999, and MacBook Pro at $1299. For education purposes, MacBook Pro can be bought for $1199.
For the uninitiated, Apple’s iPhone, iPads, and Apple Watches use its custom-designed chips for years. They’ve been building and refining Apple Silicon for more than a decade for Macs. Their persistent and culminated efforts resulted in the M1 chip, the fastest CPU core in low-power silicon, designed specifically for Mac.
While giving highlights of the new M1 chip, Johny Srouji, Apple’s senior vice president of Hardware Technologies, said, “There has never been a chip like M1, our breakthrough SoC for the Mac.
It builds on more than a decade of designing industry-leading chips for iPhone, iPad, and Apple Watch, and ushers in a whole new era for the Mac.” “When it comes to low-power silicon, M1 has the world’s fastest CPU core, the world’s fastest integrated graphics in a personal computer, and the amazing machine learning performance of the Apple Neural Engine.
With its unique combination of remarkable performance, powerful features, and incredible efficiency, M1 is by far the best chip we’ve ever created,” he further added.
To meet the relative demands considering the major crisis that this world is facing – due to COVID-19 – relevant changes have been introduced based on the exigencies of time and, so they tried to reduce any bottleneck production.
At this stage of the pandemic-related crisis, Apple pulls this transition off at its best, from Intel x86 designs to the company’s system on a chip (SOC) M1.
With 16 billion transistors integrated into 5-nanometer process technology, the M1 chip features unmistakably the fastest CPU core, machine learning accelerators with a 16-core Neural Engine that is capable of performing 11 trillion operations per second.
This enables the M1 to deliver up to 3.5x faster CPU performance and 6x faster GPU for a remarkable performance.
Also, the earlier uses of multiple chips in processors are now integrated into this one tiny chip, thus enabling M1 to perform four high-performance and four high-efficiency cores with its 8-core CPU.
Delivering highly-efficient CPU per watt, the most tedious and complicated tasks are now simplified, like never before. Gauge this fact from its ability to run up to 25,000 threads simultaneously.
Offering industry-leading performance watt, one can stream multiple 4K videos and can render complex 3D scenes. Combining the power of best technology into an M1 chip, it also features unified memory architecture and leverages the power of best technology infused in the M1 chip to access data without making a duplicate, thereby enhancing the speed and performance at an unprecedented rate.
Apple has transitioned from the Intel processors that the company had been using since 2005 to now Silicon Chips, thereby staying ahead of the time even when the world economy is crippled by the pandemic.
These Arm-based Macs come with brand new Secure Enclave for the utmost security; Advanced camera Image signal processing (ISP) for quality pictures, redundant noise, studio-quality mics, active cooling system, 20 hours of video playback, and low power consumption, thus enhancing battery life, and usage.
At the event, the company also announced the next big reveal of the operating system macOS Big Sur, a major update to the OS – version 11.0, on November 12, 2020; the first glimpse of which were disclosed back in June at Worldwide Developer Conferences. It’s yet to be seen how smoothly this new software update will run on both the Intel processor and Apple Silicon.
