According to an ex-company engineer, Apple has been planning to equip Macs with ARM technology for at least a decade. ARM 16 did not come “out of nowhere”, said Shac Ron on Tuesday on Twitter.

The kernel specialist also said that Apple had for the A7 in the year 2013 – the first 64 bit chip of the group, which was initially intended for smartphones – the instruction set architecture ( ISA) itself and thus ARM’s internal efforts to achieve a 64 bit design outperformed. “When Apple started selling iPhones with ARM chips, ARM wasn’t even finished with its own core design to get it on others to license. ”

Apple makes whole ARM industry faster ARM 64 in turn forms the basis for the M1 chips in the Mac, which are in the MacBook Pro, MacBook Air and Mac mini. 2010 almost no one would have opted for 64 – bit ARM -Cores interested. Samsung and Qualcomm, ARM’s key customers, were so surprised when Apple shipped from 2013, said Ron.

The ex-engineer also said that the M1 performance was not so high because of ARM’s own ISA, but that the ARM ISA had developed accordingly on the basis of Apple’s “plans for the core performance from a decade ago”. So the group pushed the whole industry forward.

16 Billion transistors With the appearance of the M1 Macs, the industry was amazed at the high performance of the new machines. Some of these emulate Intel code faster than it can be executed natively – and sometimes even the Rosetta 2 emulation is faster than – apparently not yet optimally adapted – ARM code. The M1 contains around 16 billion transistors. The machines have up to eight cores (four High Efficiency, four High Performance) including an eight-core GPU.

In addition, an AI processor (Neural Engine) with up to 16 Cores integrated. The high-performance cores achieve a maximum clock rate of 3.2 gigahertz. Apple is currently still working on significantly faster ARM chips for the Mac, so a professional version for the Mac Pro is also being planned.

(bsc)