The central hardware element of today’s presentation of the new Macs with the new processors is of course the SoC itself. Apple has the M1 manufactured in 5 nm at TSMC. Apple specifies the number of transistors as 16 billions. The A 14 of the new iPhones and iPads comes to 11, 8 billion transistors. Production size and number of transistors should and of course cannot be a measure of the performance of a processor.

The M1 has eight processor cores. Four are particularly fast high-performance cores that are supposed to be the fastest CPU cores currently available on the market. The high-performance cores have a 192 kB L1 instruction cache and a 128 kB L1 data cache. The four cores must share the L2 cache with a capacity of 12 MB. The four efficiency cores offer 128 kB instruction and 64 kB data L1 cache. The L2 cache is 4 MB for all cores. Both the L2 and the L1 caches increase compared to the A 13 Bionic. Comparisons to the A 14 of the new iPhones and iPads are not yet available.

With regard to the performance, Apple speaks of a three times higher performance / Watt ratio. With a power consumption of 10 W considered, Apple sees itself able to be twice as fast as the current notebook chips – here certainly the current Intel Processors. Apple also sees itself in the range of a factor of two when it comes to GPU performance. A GPU with eight cores is built into the M1.

As part of the further presentation, Apple also spoke of an enormous AI / ML performance. Here not only the eight CPU and GPU cores come into play, but also the neuronal engine. 16 of these cores are used in the M1 and, with appropriate software support, should offer a performance that is nine times higher. Of course, Apple did not go into detail about the architecture of the CPU and GPU cores. However, the Unified Memory Architecture (UMA) should play a factor in performance. All components of the SoC share a common memory, which is primarily intended to simplify data exchange between the individual components.

Universal apps will initially run on both Macs with Intel and Apple processors . With the Rosetta 2 emulation layer, x 86 apps should run at least as fast as on the native hardware. On Macs with the M1 chip, all iPhone and iPad apps run directly and without any detours.

Of course, the new MacBooks also take advantage of the efficiency benefits. The new MacBook Air has a battery life of up to 18 hours. In addition, the MacBook Air can do without a fan. This no longer applies to the Mac mini with the M1 chip. Apple relies on a fan here, which suggests a higher TDP than the MacBook Air. The ventilation is also used on the 13 “MacBook Pro.