The company will have the most control over its machines since the first Apple was built.
© APPLE INC
APPLE IS TO USE its own designs of ARM processors in all its Macs. Rumors of this move have been floating around for years—actually a decade— but now it’s a reality: Apple is dropping the x86 processor, and taking the job in-house. There are, reportedly, three different system-on-a-chip designs in development: “Project Kalamata” as it is called within Apple. The first design is based on the iPhone A14 chip (due to appear in the iPhone 12 shortly). Apple’s custom A-series chips are already the best in the business, surpassing ARM’s own designs. The chips are to be made by TSMC—Apple has no manufacturing capacity for this—and will use the same 5nm process as the A14.
The first design is expected to have 12 cores: eight high-performance “Firestorm” cores, and four energy-efficient ones. If Apple is serious (it is), then it’ll have a full road map of designs mapped out already—you don’t work on one generation at a time. All its chip design cycles will be amalgamated into one, cutting across the market sectors.