M1 Chip For Mac

[Skye1300]

What exactly is the M1 chip for Mac Book? How does it differ from what was there before? I love it so far.

 

[adrianmonk]

The M1 chip is a RISC processor by Apple licensing the ARM architecture from a company called ARM. Apple started doing this around the time of the iPhone4 and called their SoC (System on Chip) the A4. In the M1 SOC Apple includes the GPU cores, Performance and Efficiency cores, Audio, Storage etc. Due to ARM's amazing power usage, and the advancements in CPUs the M1 chip is able to provide good enough performance with low power consumption. Prior to the M1, Apple used intel CPUs (CISC). Intel was not able to provide CPU updates fast enough, and the power consumption for Intel CPUs was not very good. Apple had to enforce a strict power profile that reduced performance to keep the heat dissipation low. Which basically meant that when you were doing something very CPU intensive, and the CPU got hot, macbooks would slow the CPU to keep the heat within acceptable levels.

What are these terms ?

RISC stands for Reduced Instruction Set Computer. What this means is that rather than having many complex instructions for computation steps, these chips have a smaller set of simple instructions. These instructions can be combined to do the work of the more complex instructions. This makes the chips less complex. The manufacturer uses features like pipelining and parallelization to maintain performance. Other well known RISC CPUs are Power PC (also used in older Macs and were called the G3, G4 G5 etc), MIPS (used in graphics workstations like the SGI), SPARC (still used in Some SUN servers) and the upcoming RISC-V.

CISC or Complex Instruction Set Computer refer to chips that have many complex instructions that perform several operations. Examples are the x86/x86_64 chips like Intel and AMD, the Motorola 68k in older Macs and Amigas.

ARM was originally a CPU designed by a British computer company called Acorn. ARM used to stand for Acorn Risc Machine. When they designed the first ARM CPU, an accidental side benefit was very low power consumption. Because of this ARM CPUs were widely used in embedded devices and SoCs such as those used in phones.

A System on a Chip is a chip design which contains items that are usually kept separate. For example, an SoC might include a graphics accelerator, network, sound hardware baked in. Since they are on the same chip, they do not have to use an external bus to transmit data and keeps the full product simpler.

 

[Skye1300]

Thank you!

 

[adrianmonk]

Glad I was able to help. Let me know if you have any further questions

 

[adrianmonk]

By the way, this past week was the 30th anniversary of the Apple Newton, the precursor to the Palm Pilot, iPhone and the concept of a PDA. It was also the beginning of the dominance of the ARM chip in low power devices which has become the M1 today.

Remembering Apple’s Newton, 30 years on

 

[Skye1300]

By the way, this past week was the 30th anniversary of the Apple Newton, the precursor to the Palm Pilot, iPhone and the concept of a PDA. It was also the beginning of the dominance of the ARM chip in low power devices which has become the M1 today.

Remembering Apple’s Newton, 30 years on

Great info! Thanks!

 

[adrianmonk]

Great info! Thanks!

A good article about the history of the chip at Ars Technica.