Meet the M1 chip, designed by Apple specially for the Mac

During its latest online launch event, Apple unveiled its newest M1 chip that will be introduced in Apple’s next generation of Macs. 

The M1 is the first chip announced from Apple’s family of ARM-based Silicon chip, and comes packed with an astounding 16 billion transistors which is the most Apple has ever stuffed into a chip. This allows Apple to increase the number of CPU cores from six to eight for heavy-duty work on the Mac. 

“We’ve been making Apple Silicon for more than a decade. It’s at the heart of iPhone, iPad, and Apple Watch – and now we want to bring it to the Mac, so the Mac can take a huge leap forward with the incredible performance, custom technologies and industry-leading power efficiency of Apple Silicon,” Apple’s senior vice president of hardware technologies, Johny Srouji, said.

According to Apple, the M1 features the “world’s best CPU performance per watt, the world’s fastest integrated graphics in a personal computer, and breakthrough machine learning performance with the Apple Neural Engine.”

Not surprisingly, the M1 also features Apple’s most advanced GPU, with up to eight cores capable of running nearly 25,000 threads simultaneously.

This essentially means that the GPU will be more than capable of handling graphically-demanding tasks such as rendering complex 3D animations or images, and playbacks of multiple 4K streams.

With the M1 chip designed to excel at machine learning, tasks like video analysis, voice recognition, and image processing will now be even better than before on the Mac. 

The M1 will allow users to load apps faster on their devices and run an even wider range of apps, including ones directly from their iPhones and iPads. To take full advantage of the capabilities and power of M1, Apple has also that its newest Big Sur macOS will be optimised.

ALSO READ: Apple launches MacBook Air with first Apple-designed microprocessors

The M1 will be the power behind the newly announced MacBook Air, 13-inch MacBook Pro, and Mac mini and also marks Apple’s first step in transitioning to a new family of chips specially designed for the Mac.

This article was first published in Geek Culture.