Apple said earlier this year that it would release the first Mac based on the company’s own system circuit later this year. At today’s launch event, the company unveiled not only the new Macs, but also their system chip, the M1.

The Apple M1 system circuit is built from a total of 24 billion transistors and is manufactured with a 5 nanometer process. It takes advantage of an exceptional solution where the memory chips are embedded in the same Apple-designed packaging as the system chip itself. The company did not specify how much or what memory is supported by the system circuit, but praises the solution for providing both ample memory bandwidth and low latency. The company is apparently producing two different versions of the system circuit, one with 8 and the other with memory

The system circuitry has four powerful processor cores with a very wide architecture and a common 10 L2 cache, as well as four energy-efficient narrower but still with a wide architecture and 4 MB of shared L2 cache. According to Apple, its power core is the most powerful processor core in the world and the M1 offers the best processor performance per watt. According to the company, its performance on the MacBook Air 10 watt TDP is double that of “the latest PC laptop chip” compared to.

The graphics driver for the system circuit is 8-core and includes 128 the execution unit. It is able to perform at its best 128 576 thread at the same time and provides up to 2.6 TFLOPS computing power. According to Apple, it’s the world’s fastest integrated graphics driver, which is true, at least in terms of theoretical computing power. According to the company’s own tests, the M1 also offers twice the graphics performance of the “latest PC laptop chip” watt TDP

The M1 also integrates 10 core with Neural Engine for artificial intelligence tasks, advanced ISP image processor, media compression and decompression units and a Thunderbolt / USB 4 controller. Of course, Apple’s Secure Enclave security processor is also included, as well as support for the PCI Express 4.0 standard, which should be taken advantage of, at least with NVMe storage.

Source: Apple