the beginning of the magazine, where the articles are small
APPLE’S MOVE away from x86 architecture has begun in earnest with the release of the first batch of machines sporting the Apple-designed M1 processor. This isn’t the first time Apple has jumped horses—it started out using Motorola chips in 1983, and stuck with these until 1995 when it switched to PowerPC chips, then in 2006 it moved to Intel x86 silicon. Following the success of the ARM chips in its iPhones and iPads, it has gone and launched new MacBook Pro, MacBook Air, and Mac minis all sporting the new M1 chip, and all considerably faster than their predecessors. Dubbed “the first chip designed specifically for the Mac,” the M1 is a SoC built using a 5nm process. It has four performance cores (Firestorm), and four highefficiency cores (Icestorm), in a 4+4 big.little design. It’s roughly a desktop version of the A14 chip Apple has been putting into its iPhones, only with two more Firestorm cores, and twice the GPU cores. The M1 was built on the back of the experience and revenues the iPhone generated. Apple has at last built the chip it wanted.