So yeah the Apple Silicon is real atlas. During the One More Thing part of the Apple special event that took place on 10th Nov last year, Apple unveiled its in-house M1 Silicon chips that will replace the slow and sluggish Intel chips in the future Macs and claimed it to be faster by as much as 2-3x than that of the class segment in the PC world.
Just see the difference between a PC chip and the M1 at 10W of power. Even you-tubers like MKBHD, i Justine, Jonathan, Lew, Linus, Rennie, The Verge has been shocked by the performance to peer ratio of these M1 chips. The graphical performance is also exceptional. It's ground breaking for an integrated one. A 999$ fan less baseline M1 Mac-book Air outperforms a decked out 5000$ 16” Intel i9 powered Mac Book Pro. These level of performance is just bonkers, unreal and out of the world.
SO HOW ON EARTH APPLE MANAGED TO CREATE M1?
The M1 did not happen-overnight. It is the result of 10 years of planning and development. The M1 is not a 1st get experimental product that turned out to be great, but it is a well tested and well developed product at its peak-point. Apple has been making their own silicon for their iPhone since 2010.
Apple debuted with A4 in its iPhone 4 and since then until now has been setting a new industry standard with the release of a new model every year in their latest iPhones with A14 being the latest.
M1 is developed on ARM/RISC architecture which uses a lot less set of instructions to carry out a task where as Intel and AMD uses x86, which is based on CISC architecture and it contains tones of extra instructions which are hardly ever used. So at this pace at which Apple is currently developing and advancing the arm architecture and their A series processor, x86 processor theoretically can never regain its crown.
WHY APPLE NEEDED TO CREATE THEIR OWN CHIP?
Well, if I’m being honest, I think this was inevitable. Just look at the rest of Apple’s product line-up! What makes them so magical? It’s the integration between their hardware and software. As Alan Key once said “Those who are serious about their software should make their own hardware.” And Apple does exactly the same thing. Look at the iPhone! It is probably the most influential tech product of this century and Apple is responsible for both the hardware and the software. And this practice goes throughout their line-up including everything iPad, Apple Watch, Air-pods, Home-pods - each and every product of their lineup. They custom develop the silicon of all their products in-house except for the Mac line-up. And when compared to all the other products the unsatisfactory ratio among customers was the highest among the Mac users. When Apple transitioned from Power PC to Intel everyone thought that the Mac will be transformed exponentially but that wasn’t the case. The Mac was always restricted from its true potential for using Intel chips. The i9 powered Mac-book Pro regardless of its exceptional design and software struggled from thermal throttling because of the limitation of the Intel chips. This is just one of the many examples. Also just think and you’ll see that the new iPhone are always more or less released in September every year unlike Macs which has no fixed released date or often postponed thanks to the delay in the development of the Intel chips. To my eyes the only thing that was holding the Mac until now was the usage of 3rd party silicon that doesn’t optimize with the software magically. Apple now can the bring the magical experience of their iPhone and iPods to the Macs now. Already in the keynote one of the executive demonstrated how almost all the iPhone and iPad app store apps work seamlessly on Mac OS Big Sur. This is Apple’s ultimate goal- complete fluidity and unity and uniformity throughout the product line-up subsequently or in other words a perfect ecosystem.
SO WHAT ABOUT THE REST OF THE INDUSTRY?
Apple isn’t the first company to use ARM based processors in the PC market. Microsoft first launched Surface Pro X on October, 2019 which was powered by a Qualcomm made chip. Okay in simple words, the experience was awful and the product was terrible to use. Most of the apps weren’t optimized for ARM and wouldn’t launch and the chip overall wasn’t powerful enough to carry out even the optimized applications. So why was it so horrible? Microsoft makes windows whereas Qualcomm is making the ARM chip. Qualcomm makes a bunch of other processors for mobile devices for several other brands which use respected customized operating systems. Hence the software and the hardware will never be optimized perfectly for each other but made on an average and the opposite of this scenario is exactly what Apple has been doing with its products for years. Apple make their own hardware as well as their own software. As a result the iPhone with only 3 or 4gb of memory provides better and more reliable performance than the flagship android devices which generally consists of 10+ GB of ram as well as similar or better battery life at the same time being significantly lower in capacity as compared to the rest of the industry. The M1 is just bringing this world-class performance to the Mac. Apple makes their own OS called the “Mac OS” and now with their own hardware “Apple Silicon” the recreation of the magical iPhone like experience for the Mac is here.
Apple M1 is the most influential tech released after the launch of the original iPhone and forced every other PC maker to participate in a game which Apple created and only they can win. With the upcoming rumors of a more powerful version of the M1, all I can say is hold down your breath and enjoy the development of personal computing because it is just the beginning. Apple M1 just changed everything and reshaped the entire PC industry for the forthcoming future.
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