WEBVTT 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:04.680 A short while ago, we did a video on what we might expect from Apple's in-house silicon 00:00:04.680 --> 00:00:09.040 after it was announced this past summer, but now, the first systems with the Apple M1, 00:00:09.040 --> 00:00:12.840 the inaugural chip in the new Apple Silicon series, are on the market. 00:00:12.840 --> 00:00:17.200 So, let's take a closer look at how the chips perform and the innovations under the hood 00:00:17.200 --> 00:00:20.280 that Apple hopes will make the M1 a home run. 00:00:20.280 --> 00:00:25.040 A cursory glance might make you think that the M1 is just a souped-up mobile chip as 00:00:25.040 --> 00:00:30.320 it is quite similar to the A14 in the current iPhone 12 lineup, with four high-performance 00:00:30.320 --> 00:00:37.240 and four higher-efficiency cores. And it has IO controllers and built-in memory that makes it more of a mobile system on a 00:00:37.240 --> 00:00:44.840 chip than a plain CPU. But Apple claims that it's the world's fastest laptop CPU, and early reviews actually show 00:00:44.840 --> 00:00:51.440 that this claim isn't really unfair, with many commentators gushing over its performance. 00:00:51.440 --> 00:00:56.760 But how did Apple pull this off without fundamentally changing the design from what it's using in 00:00:56.760 --> 00:01:04.560 its smartphones? Part of the answer is that Apple used a lot more transistors in the M1 than the A14. 00:01:04.560 --> 00:01:12.600 Over four billion more, according to the company. But while this may have boosted performance, the real secret sauce lies in how Apple's 00:01:12.600 --> 00:01:19.280 design, both in the A14 and the M1, fundamentally differs from x86, which is the architecture 00:01:19.280 --> 00:01:27.200 that AMD and Intel have been using for decades. Apple's philosophy was to make the chip much more parallel than conventional CPU designs. 00:01:27.200 --> 00:01:32.400 Both the M1's decoder, which translates incoming instructions, and the execution units, that 00:01:32.400 --> 00:01:38.200 actually process them, are wider, meaning they can accept more instructions at once. 00:01:38.200 --> 00:01:43.680 Additionally, the M1 can go significantly deeper with out-of-order execution, meaning 00:01:43.680 --> 00:01:48.720 that it can read ahead on the page and anticipate which instructions a program will need to 00:01:48.720 --> 00:01:54.160 have processed ahead of time to a greater extent to that of x86. 00:01:54.160 --> 00:02:00.960 Then you have the fact that the M1 features a lot more level 1 cache than x86 processors, 00:02:00.960 --> 00:02:04.320 which is the fastest cache memory available to a CPU core. 00:02:04.320 --> 00:02:09.400 And because it's based on a chip originally meant for mobiles, it does all this while 00:02:09.400 --> 00:02:17.440 drawing significantly less power. But hold on a second, couldn't Intel and AMD just implement some of the changes themselves 00:02:17.440 --> 00:02:24.280 and catch up with Apple? Well it turns out that might be quite a challenge, as the x86 architecture has some inherent 00:02:24.280 --> 00:02:30.840 limitations. For example, AMD and Intel could just try and add more L1 cache, but it's extremely 00:02:30.840 --> 00:02:37.000 difficult to make decoders much wider than they are now on x86 chips, so can't win 00:02:37.000 --> 00:02:42.680 them all. So does this mean that Intel and AMD are in huge trouble? 00:02:42.680 --> 00:02:47.360 Well, like any new impressive piece of tech, the M1 isn't without its weaknesses. 00:02:47.360 --> 00:02:51.880 As we see, although early reviews have reported very impressive performance gains in first 00:02:51.880 --> 00:02:57.040 party apps that have been written for Apple Silicon, the M1's speed benefits in other 00:02:57.040 --> 00:03:03.160 applications have been more modest, as programs written for x86 have to be emulated, which 00:03:03.160 --> 00:03:06.240 introduces significant CPU overhead. 00:03:06.240 --> 00:03:10.960 And because the emulation process is imperfect, there have also been stability issues with 00:03:10.960 --> 00:03:16.020 a number of popular programs, even though they were written for late model Mac hardware. 00:03:16.020 --> 00:03:20.620 But Apple is betting that because developers who have large user bases on the Mac platform 00:03:20.620 --> 00:03:26.020 would like to keep it that way, those developers will adapt and come out with versions specifically 00:03:26.020 --> 00:03:32.900 written for the M1 sooner than later. This approach is more or less in line with Apple's playbook for other new products. 00:03:32.900 --> 00:03:37.180 They bring a new platform to market and then use their brand power to force developers 00:03:37.180 --> 00:03:42.340 to catch up, which is something that they hope will again happen with the M1. 00:03:42.340 --> 00:03:47.220 Ultimately, it's not hard to imagine offering a more tightly controlled App Store experience 00:03:47.220 --> 00:03:52.340 for Macs, with programs being specifically vetted for full compatibility with Apple Silicon, 00:03:52.340 --> 00:03:56.620 especially as we expect to see more of Apple's chips in desktop Macs down the line after 00:03:56.620 --> 00:04:01.340 seeing how powerful their first crack at a laptop processor has been. 00:04:01.340 --> 00:04:04.980 Hmm, not even the mood for some Apple chips for the side of peanut butter. 00:04:12.340 --> 00:04:13.900 Thanks for watching, and I'll see you in the next video.