“One more thing …” : Apple chooses this iconic expression as the title of today’s presentation event. It is an expression that Steve Jobs loved to use at the end of his keynote, to remove the veil from the product more interesting, innovative or revolutionary. Using this expression to hold an event is a clue to something particularly big.

And here, after announcing the Apple Silicon processors at the last WWDC , Apple today formalizes its introduction, presenting the first member of the family of ARM processors for notebook / desktop use developed internally: welcome M1 .

Here is the first Apple Silicon SoC: M1 arrives

Apple’s first step into the world of computer processors is a solution whose priority is to raise the balance between consumption and performance to new benchmarks. Apple has built this processor based on the experience accumulated over the years with the design and development of SoCs for iPhone and iPad. And M1 is also a SoC – System on Chip – which incorporates all the most important features in a single chip.

M1 is made with 5 production process nanometers , which allow to condense up to 16 billions of transistors on the chip . The SoC is composed of one CPU with 8 cores, 4 of which are high performance and 4 are highly efficient (similar to what happens on iPhone and iPad). The SoC also features a unified memory architecture. La Mela does not indicate the operating frequencies of its SoC .

Apple points out how the SoC M1 was built putting the concept of performance per watt in the first place: as regards the balance between performance and consumption, Apple provides, as usual, generic indications, which must be taken for what they are: Apple states that the 4 high-efficiency cores are able to express a computing capacity equal to that of the dual-core Intel Core i3 cpu currently used on MacBook Air. In general M1 is capable, both on the CPU side and on the GPU side, with consumption of 10 W to deliver double the performance, while the peak performance allows you to consume a quarter of energy less: the comparison is with a generic “latest PC laptop chip” with integrated graphics, but it is not given know which processor is being used as a reference.

Much of this is made possible thanks to the deep integration between the M1 chip and the new operating system Mac Os Big Sur , which has been specifically optimized to make the most of the new processor. This allows, at least according to Apple’s statements, to have an extremely reactive system, which immediately recovers from sleep and is able to always maintain the most adequate balance between consumption and performance thanks to the synergistic work of SoC and operating system. Apple predictably claims to have optimized M1 specifically on the workloads of its applications, and indicates – also here to be considered in a generic and indicative way – up to 6 times higher performance for Final Cut Pro and the ability to use up to three times the number of plugins on Logic Pro.

As for third-party applications in this transition phase, which Apple promises will be completed in two years, we will have the Universal App , the environment Rosetta 2 and the possibility of using the apps originally designed for iOS .

Universal Apps contain code both for running on new ARM-based Apple Silicon, and for Intel processors. The Rosetta 2 environment – a sort of emulator – will instead be used to “translate” applications not yet updated in real time so that they can also operate on systems with Apple Silicon.

The new Apple M1 SoC – of which much more will be known in the coming days and weeks, as the information disclosed by Apple is quite generic – has been used for three new systems : MacBook Air, Mac Mini and MacBook Pro.