Apple leads the industry as personal computing moves to ARM.
Some of us have been waiting for years for the event Apple wrapped up in under 50 minutes and likely spent years preparing for: Macs are moving to ARM-based Apple Silicon and the way the company sees it the transition should be better for everyone. Apple was pretty aggressive when it introduced us to its new Apple Silicon Macs, which (as expected) deliver screaming performance, thanks in part to the 5nm chips Apple has developed on ARM, and thanks also to the work of the company’s silicon design teams. Some benchmarks: That’s the Mac/PC discussion right there. Apple knows it. It ended the event with a short reprise of its famous ‘Get A Mac’ ads starring John Hodgman as PC. The point he made? Now Apple’s shifted to its own chips, those PCs can no longer keep up. We’ve all expected Apple to deliver a new Mac chip based in some way on the A-series chips it uses in iPhones and iPads. Apple wasn’t too specific around the relationships between these Apple Silicon siblings, but it did tell us the following concerning the M1 chip it’s putting inside these new Macs: Advanced power management, low-power video playback, HDR imaging and video processor, high-bandwidth caches, machine learning accelerators, a high-quality image signal processor (ISP), high-efficiency audio,4th generation PCI express and NVMe storage. Apple says: “M1 delivers up to 3.5x faster CPU performance, up to 6x faster GPU performance and up to 15x faster machine learning, all while enabling battery life up to 2x longer than previous generation Macs.” The company worked quite hard to put a little context around these “speeds and feeds” claims, noting real life benefits, such as: Perhaps the most impressive statistic in terms of sheer computational power (at least to me) was Apple’s claim that the first M1-powered MacBook Pro will play back full quality 8k ProRes video in DaVinci Resolve with zero dropped frames.
