A short while ago, we did a video on what we might expect from Apple's in-house silicon
after it was announced this past summer, but now, the first systems with the Apple M1,
the inaugural chip in the new Apple Silicon series, are on the market.
So, let's take a closer look at how the chips perform and the innovations under the hood
that Apple hopes will make the M1 a home run.
A cursory glance might make you think that the M1 is just a souped-up mobile chip as
it is quite similar to the A14 in the current iPhone 12 lineup, with four high-performance
and four higher-efficiency cores. And it has IO controllers and built-in memory that makes it more of a mobile system on a
chip than a plain CPU. But Apple claims that it's the world's fastest laptop CPU, and early reviews actually show
that this claim isn't really unfair, with many commentators gushing over its performance.
But how did Apple pull this off without fundamentally changing the design from what it's using in
its smartphones? Part of the answer is that Apple used a lot more transistors in the M1 than the A14.
Over four billion more, according to the company. But while this may have boosted performance, the real secret sauce lies in how Apple's
design, both in the A14 and the M1, fundamentally differs from x86, which is the architecture
that AMD and Intel have been using for decades. Apple's philosophy was to make the chip much more parallel than conventional CPU designs.
Both the M1's decoder, which translates incoming instructions, and the execution units, that
actually process them, are wider, meaning they can accept more instructions at once.
Additionally, the M1 can go significantly deeper with out-of-order execution, meaning
that it can read ahead on the page and anticipate which instructions a program will need to
have processed ahead of time to a greater extent to that of x86.
Then you have the fact that the M1 features a lot more level 1 cache than x86 processors,
which is the fastest cache memory available to a CPU core.
And because it's based on a chip originally meant for mobiles, it does all this while
drawing significantly less power. But hold on a second, couldn't Intel and AMD just implement some of the changes themselves
and catch up with Apple? Well it turns out that might be quite a challenge, as the x86 architecture has some inherent
limitations. For example, AMD and Intel could just try and add more L1 cache, but it's extremely
difficult to make decoders much wider than they are now on x86 chips, so can't win
them all. So does this mean that Intel and AMD are in huge trouble?
Well, like any new impressive piece of tech, the M1 isn't without its weaknesses.
As we see, although early reviews have reported very impressive performance gains in first
party apps that have been written for Apple Silicon, the M1's speed benefits in other
applications have been more modest, as programs written for x86 have to be emulated, which
introduces significant CPU overhead.
And because the emulation process is imperfect, there have also been stability issues with
a number of popular programs, even though they were written for late model Mac hardware.
But Apple is betting that because developers who have large user bases on the Mac platform
would like to keep it that way, those developers will adapt and come out with versions specifically
written for the M1 sooner than later. This approach is more or less in line with Apple's playbook for other new products.
They bring a new platform to market and then use their brand power to force developers
to catch up, which is something that they hope will again happen with the M1.
Ultimately, it's not hard to imagine offering a more tightly controlled App Store experience
for Macs, with programs being specifically vetted for full compatibility with Apple Silicon,
especially as we expect to see more of Apple's chips in desktop Macs down the line after
seeing how powerful their first crack at a laptop processor has been.
Hmm, not even the mood for some Apple chips for the side of peanut butter.
Thanks for watching, and I'll see you in the next video.