FEED YOUR MIND. FEAST YOUR EYES.

First Macs with breakthrough Apple– designed M1 chip

BY ALEX SUMMERSBY

The new Macs with Apple silicon promise big improvements.

Next–gen Macs arrive

APPLEIS SHIPPING the first Macs powered by Apple silicon, a new generation of chips designed by Apple itself, in place of the Intel processors that have been inside the Mac line for the past 15 years.

The new MacBook Air, 13–inch MacBook Pro, and Mac mini are built around the Apple M1 chip, which Apple describes as “by far the most powerful chip Apple has ever made.”

Apple is pointedly not quoting clock speeds, instead emphasizing performance: “With its industry– leading performance per watt, together with macOS Big Sur, M1 delivers up to 3.5x faster CPU, up to 6x faster GPU, up to 15x faster machine learning (ML) capabilities, and battery life up to 2x longer than before.” Impressive for entry– level machines! iPhone, iPad and Apple Watch have all used Apple–designed chips for more than a decade. Apple is bringing this experience and the same System on a Chip (SoC) approach to its computers, with 8–core CPU, up to 8–core GPU, I/O, Neural Engine, and Secure Enclave security all integrated in the one chip. M1 also features a unified memory architecture so all these functions share the same high– bandwidth, low–latency memory pool. Apple says this improves performance and efficiency as data doesn’t have to be copied between CPU and GPU, for example. But the M1–based Macs max out at 16GB of RAM and don’t support external GPUs, so these models aren’t for users who may require more.